Remotely sensed image retrieval based on region-level semantic mining

Abstract

As satellite images are widely used in a large number of applications in recent years, content-based image retrieva technique has become important tools for image exploration and information mining; however, their performances are limited by the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level concepts. To narrow this semantic gap, a region-level semantic mining approach is proposed in this article. Because it is easier for users to understand image content by region, images are segmented into several parts using an improved segmentation algorithm, each with homogeneous spectral and textural characteristics, and then a uniform region-based representation for each image is built Once the probabilistic relationship among image, region, and hidden semantic is constructed, the Expectation Maximization method can be applied to mine the hidden semantic. We implement this approach on a dataset consisting ofthousands ofsatellite images and obtain a high retrieval precision, as demonstrated through experiments. © 2012 Liu et al; licensee Springer.