A Color Image Representation Approach for Content-Based Image Retrieval

Abstract

In this paper, a color image representation approach is proposed for color image retrieval. First, an input color image is represented by a number representative images (called color degree images) consisting of chromatic (including red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow) and achromatic (including black and white) degree images. For each pixel, the degree to which its color value is similar to each representative color will be computed. For the local window centered at each detected key point, a vector representing the degree values, called local color degree (LCD) descriptor, will be computed to describe the local color property. Meanwhile, the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptor is extracted to describe the local texture characteristics. Both LCD descriptor and SIFT descriptor are combined together to form the local descriptor. Vector of locally aggregated descriptors (VLAD) is then employed to aggregate all local descriptors to get a single VLAD vector for each input image. Experimental results on INRIA Holidays and Leeds Butterfly datasets have shown that the proposed descriptor yield higher retrieval accuracy.