Multiple Parenting Phylogeny Relationships in Digital Images

Recently, several studies have been concerned with modeling the parenthood relationships between near duplicates in a set of images. Two images share a parenthood relationship if one is obtained by applying transformations to the other. However, this is not the only form of parenting that can exist among images. An image might be a composition created through the combination of the semantic information existent in two or more source images, establishing a relationship between the sources and the composite. The problem of identifying these relations in a set containing near-duplicate subsets of source and composition images is referred to as multiple parenting phylogeny. Thus far, researchers tackled this problem with a three-step solution: 1) separation of near-duplicate groups; 2) classification of the relations between the groups; and 3) identification of the images used to create the original composition. In this work, we extend upon this framework by introducing key improvements, such as better identification of when two images share content, and improved ways to compare this content. In addition, we also introduce a new realistic professionally created data set of compositions involving multiple parenting relationships. The method we present in this paper is properly evaluated through quantitative metrics, established for assessing the accuracy in finding multiple parenting relationships. Finally, we discuss some particularities of the framework, such as the importance of an accurate reconstruction of phylogenies and the method’s behavior when dealing with more complex compositions.