Content-based Image Retrieval Using Color Adjacency and Gradient
Hongyan Jin, Ho-Young Lee, Hee-Soo Kim, Gi-Seok Kim, Yeong‐Ho Ha · Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea · 2001
A new content-based color image retrieval method integrating the features of the color adjacency and the gradient is proposed in this paper. As the most used feature of color image, color histogram has its own advantages that it is invariant to the changes in viewpoint and the rotation of the image etc., and the computation of the feature is simple and fast. However, it is difficult to distinguish those different images having similar color distributions using histogram-based image retrieval, because the color histogram is generated on uniformly quantized colors and the histogram itself contains no spatial information. And another shortcoming of the histogram-based image retrieval is the storage of the features is usually very large. In order to prevent the above drawbacks, the gradient that is the largest color difference of neighboring pixels is calculated in the proposed method instead of the uniform quantization which is commonly used at most histogram-based methods. And the color adjacency information which indicates major color composition feature of an image is extracted and represented as a binary form to reduce the amount of feature storage. The two features are integrated to allow the retrieval more robust to the changes of various external conditions.