SURF for image retrieval

Dear Team,

I've few doubts in implementation of SURF? In most of the web tutorials i've read SURF seem to be focussed on a simple comparison between two images. Instead of determining how similar two images are, would it be practical to use SURF to find the N closest matching images out of a collection of thousands of images?

For example, would it be practical to use SURF to generate keypoints for a batch of images, store the keypoints in a database, and then find the ones that have the shortest Euclidean distance to the keypoints generated for a "query" image?

Looking forward for your valuable suggestions and guidance on how to proceed if this could be done?

Malini

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

You can use SIFT and SURF for "scene matching" and Content Based Image Retrieval. I've seen some impressive results. Though with SIFT, since it's patented, that can be a problem. Many people, including the Mathworks in their Computer Vision System Toolbox, use SURF which is about as good as SIFT and much faster. With CBIR, there are a lot of different features and algorithms that can be used to suggest similar images. It's too involved to get into here, plus it's a rapidly evolving field of study. You can get MATLAB SIFT code at http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vedaldi/code/sift.html, or http://www.vlfeat.org/

[Malini]

Thank you for your quick response. Kindly request you to please let me know how to add the vlfeat to matlab toolbox.I'm using MATLAB R2013a.

I tried copy pasting vlfeat folder to 'C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2013a\toolbox' and run the below command in editor window.

% SETUP Add the required search paths to MATLAB if exist('vl_version') ~= 3, run('vlfeat/toolbox/vl_setup') ; end

but, it is showing below error:(

Error using run (line 40) vlfeat\toolbox\vl_setup not found.

FYIP , the vlfeat folder which i tried copying 'C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2013a\toolbox' contains vl_setup file in it.

Please let me know if i'm wrong in the process of running vlfeat in MATLAB.

Thank you.

Malini

[Walter Roberson]

It looks like you might be using Student Version of MATLAB. If so, then for the Computer Version toolbox see http://www.mathworks.com/academia/student_version/companion.html

[Malini]

Thank you. But I'm using MATLAB full-version. Could u please let me know how to run vlfeat in full version of MATLAB R2013a.

[Malini]

Thank you. I've successfully installed vlfeat in MATLAB R2013a. Reason for the error was that the setup file was in .m extension in the downloaded zipped file and when i removed the .m extension and ran, it went through successfully.

Thank you Image Analyst and Walter for sparing your valuable time to answer my question.

Cheers,

Malini