Hierarchical image classification in the bioscience literature.

Our previous work has shown that images appearing in bioscience articles can be classified into five types: Gel-Image, Image-of-Thing, Graph, Model, and Mix. For this paper, we explored and analyzed features strongly associated with each image type and developed a hierarchical image classification approach for classifying an image into one of the five types. First, we applied texture features to separate images into two groups: 1) a texture group comprising Gel Image, Image-of-Thing, and Mix, and 2) a non-texture group comprising Graph and Model. We then applied entropy, skewness, and uniformity for the first group, and edge difference, uniformity, and smoothness for the second group to classify images into specific types. Our results show that hierarchical image classification accurately divided images into the two groups during the initial classification and that the overall accuracy of the image classification was higher than that of our previous approach. In particular, the recall of hierarchical image classification was greatly improved due to the high accuracy of the initial classification.