IMPROVING IMAGE RETRIEVAL PERFORMANCE BY USING BOTH COLOR AND TEXTURE FEATURES

Dengsheng Zhang

Gippsland School of Computing and Information Technology

Monash University, Churchill, Victoria 3842, Australia

Email: dengsheng.zhang@infotech.monash.edu.au

  

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is an important multimedia application. In recently created MPEG-7 standard, image content is described by perceptual features such as color, texture and shape. Among these low level features, color features have been adopted in most of the image retrieval applications. Color feature is important and can be conveniently extracted from images. However, image retrieval using color features often gives disappointing results because in many cases, images with similar colors do not have similar content. Color methods incorporating spatial information have been proposed to solve this problem, however, these methods often result in very high dimensions of features which drastically slow down the retrieval speed. In this paper, a method combining both color and texture features of image is proposed to improve the retrieval performance. Given a query, images in the database are firstly ranked using color features. Then the top ranked images are re-ranked according to their texture features. Results show the second process improves retrieval performance significantly.

Keywords: CBIR, color, texture, image retrieval.