Image indexing and retrieval based on color histograms

Abstract

While general object recognition is difficult, it is relatively easy to capture various primitive properties such as color distributions, prominent regions and their topological features from an image and use them to narrow down the search space when attempts to retrieving images by contents from an image database are made.

In this paper, we present an image database in which images are indexed and retrieved based on color histograms. We first address the problems inherent in color histograms created by the conventional method, and then propose a new method to create histograms which are compact in size and insensitive to minor illumination variations such as highlight, shape, and etc. A powerful indexing scheme where each histogram of an image is encoded into a numerical key, and stored in a two-layered tree structure is introduced. This approach turns the problem of histogram matching, which is computation intensive, into index key search, so as to realize quick data access in a large scale image database. Two types of user interfaces, Query by user provided sample images, and Query by combination of the system provided templates, are provided to meet various user requests. Various experimental evaluations exhibit the effectiveness of the image database system.