Region-Based Image Retrieval with Perceptual Colors

Ying Liu , Dengsheng Zhang , Guojun Lu
Gippsland School of Computing and Information Technology, Monash University, Vic, 3842, Australia

Wei-Ying Ma
Microsoft Research Asia, No. 49 ZhiChun Road, Beijing, 100080, China

Abstract

Due to the semantic gap between low-level visual features and the rich semantics in users mind, performance of traditional content-based image retrieval systems is

far from users expectation. In attempt to reduce the semantic gap, this paper introduces a region-based image retrieval system with high-level semantic color names

used. For each segmented region, we define a perceptual color as the low-level color feature of the region. This perceptual color is then converted to a semantic color

name. In this way, the system reduces the semantic gap between numerical image features and the richness of human semantics. Four different ways to calculate

perceptual color are studied. Experimental results confirm the substantial performance of the proposed system compared to traditional CBIR systems.