Content-Based Image Retrieval Using Gamma Distribution and Mixture Model

Abstract

Since the last decade, the complexity of multimedia data, specifically images, is emerging exponentially as millions of images are uploaded by users on daily basis. Searching for a relevant image from such a substantial amount of data is very hectic and resource-demanding. To cope with this issue, researchers are working on content-based image retrieval (CBIR) approaches. This article proposes an efficient and novel probabilistic technique as a solution for content-based image retrieval. The patterns formed by the glyph structure of an image are excavated to yield content representations. These representations are accumulatively used to form a distribution, whereas the characteristics of this distribution represent the semantic structure of the image. In the end, the mixture model for gamma distribution is applied and parameters are refined through maximum likelihood. Furthermore, a mechanism is devised to retrieve matching images having comparable distribution patterns. Experiments show not only that the proposed technique yields a comparable precision to other competitive techniques but it also demonstrates that it is sufficiently efficient with high performance compared as compared to the others and requires unsupervised training.