IMAGE INDEXING AND RETRIEVAL BASED ON COLOR HISTOGRAMS

While general object recognition is difficult, it is relatively easy t o capture various primitive properties such as color distributions, pr ominent regions and their topological features from an image and use t hem to narrow down the search space when attempts to retrieving images by contents from an image database are made. In this paper, we presen t an image database in which images are indexed and retrieved based on color histograms. We first address the problems inherent in color his tograms created by the conventional method, and then propose a new met hod to create histograms which are compact in size and insensitive to minor illumination variations such as highlight, shape, and etc. A pow erful indexing scheme where each histogram of an image is encoded into a numerical key, and stored in a two-layered tree structure is introd uced. This approach turns the problem of histogram matching, which is computation intensive, into index key search, so as to realize quick d ata access in a large scale image database. Two types of user interfac es, Query by user provided sample images, and Query by combination of the system provided templates, are provided to meet various user reque sts. Various experimental evaluations exhibit the effectiveness of the image database system.