A general approach to indexing and retrieval of images in image databases

Abstract

In this paper we present a very general approach to indexing and retrieval of images in image database systems. We allow dierent ways of indexing and matching for objects in an image, and integrate them with our existing approach of the generalized extended pseudo-2D string and generalized combined 2D string representation of the image to formulate a more general framework for iconic indexing and retrieval of images. Image retrieval is then discussed, and the query processing of image retrieval consists of both matching of objects and matching of spatial relationships. This suggestion for general-purpose image database systems is particularly suitable for building huge, heterogeneous and distributed image databases. 1. Introduction. Image database systems have been very active over the past 20 years. With the explosive interest for the last 10 years in multimedia systems, content-based image retrieval has attracted the attention of researchers across sev- eral disciplines (7), including computer vision, pattern recognition, human-computer interaction, and image databases. Applications that use image databases include oce