An Environment-visualization System with Image-based Retrieval and Distance Calculation Method

Many environmental issues have occured in this world and these issues are common to all human beings. It is considered that environmental issues caused by humans exist in the "border" between nature and human society. In other words, there is the possibility that finding the "border" leads to determine the cause of environmental issues and discover the solution. This paper presents an environment-visualization system with image-based retrieval and distance calculation method as the first step of research for finding the "border". We focused on the plastic garbage issue which is related to SDGs14 and this study was made to find the "border", source of the plastic garbage which is scattered on the coast area. In addition, we aim to realize the system which enables people to share the knowledge about the plastic issue in order to acquire knowledge of the environment issues and to promote concrete action to realize sustainable nature and society. In this system, there are 3 features: (1) Composition-Based Image Retrieval Function, (2) Spatio-Temporal-Based Mapping Function, and (3) Coast-area Location-Checking for Selected Images Function. (1) is the image retrieval function for detecting highly-related images to a query-image with dividing one image to three images for separating with nature, human society, and "border". We used euclid calculation to calculate the similarity and show the results in the ranking format. ( (3) is the location-checking function to judge whether the photographing spot is near the ocean or not with image processing metric and select the images only which are near the ocean.We present several experimental results to clarify the feasibility and effectiveness of our method.