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.