Color image retrieval using hybrid graph representation

In this paper, a robust color image retrieval algorithm is proposed based o n the hybrid graph representation, i.e., a dual graph which consists of the Modified Color Adjacency Graph (MCAG) and Spatial Variance Graph (SVG). Th e MCAG, which is similar to the Color Adjacency Graph (CAG) [6], is propose d to enhance the indexing ability and the database capacity, by increasing the feature dimension. In addition, the SVG is introduced, in order to util ize the geometric statistics of the chromatic segment in the spatial domain . In the matching process, we expand the histogram intersection [2] into th e graph intersection, in which graph matching is performed using simple mat rix operations. Intensive discussions and experimental results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Experiments are car ried out on the Swain's test images and the Virage images, demonstrating th at the proposed algorithm yields high retrieval performance with tolerable computational complexity. It is also shown that the proposed algorithm work s well, even if the query image is corrupted. e.g., a large part of pixels is missing. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.