Patent Image Retrieval Using SURF Direction histograms
Juhee Yoo, Kyoung-Mi Lee · Journal of KIISE · 2015
Recently, patent images are growing importance and thus patent image retrieval is a growing area of research. However, most existing patent image retrieval systems use edges extracted in the images, whose performance is affected by the quality of edge detection in the image pre-processing step. To overcome this disadvantage, we propose a SURF-based patent image retrieval method which uses the morphological characteristics of the images. The proposed method detects SURF interest points with directions and computes regional histograms. We apply the proposed method to a patent image database with 2000 binary images and we show the proposed retrieval system achieves excellent results, even when the images have some loss or degradation.