A New Three-dimensional Integrated Multi-index Method for CBIR System

Abstract

This paper proposes a new image retrieval method called the 3D integrated multi-index to fuse SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) visual words with other features at the indexing level. The advantage of the 3D integrated multi-index is that it can produce finer subdivisions in the search space. Compared with the inverted indices of medium-sized codebook, the proposed method increases time slightly in preprocessing and querying. Particularly, the SIFT, contour and colour features are fused into the integrated multi-index, and the joint cooperation of complementary features significantly reduces the impact of false positive matches, so that effective image retrieval can be achieved. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets show that the 3D integrated multi-index significantly improves the retrieval accuracy. While compared with other methods, it requires an acceptable memory usage and query time. Importantly, we show that the 3D integrated multi-index is well complementary to many prior techniques, which make our method compared favorably with the state-of-the-arts.