Integrated querying of images by color, shape, and texture content of salient objects

Abstract

The growing prevalence of multimedia systems is bringing the need for efficient techniques for storing and retrieving images into and from a database. In order to satisfy the information need of the users, it is of vital importance to effectively and efficiently adapt the retrieval process to each user. Considering this fact, an application for querying the images via their color, shape, and texture features in order to retrieve the similar salient objects is proposed. The features employed in content-based retrieval are most often simple low-level representations, while a human observer judges similarity between images based on highlevel semantic properties. Using color, shape, and texture as an example, we show that a more accurate description of the underlying distribution of low-level features improves the retrieval quality. The performance experiments show that our application is effective in retrieval quality and has low processing cost. © Springer-Verlag 2004.