Searching images with MPEG-7 (& MPEG-7-like) Powered Localized dEscriptors: The SIMPLE answer to effective Content Based Image Retrieval

Abstract

In this paper we propose and evaluate a new technique that localizes the description ability of the well established MPEG-7 and MPEG-7-like global descriptors. We employ the SURF detector to define salient image patches of blob-like textures and use the MPEG-7 Scalable Color (SC), Color Layout (CL) and Edge Histogram (EH) descriptors and the global MPEG-7-like Color and Edge Directivity Descriptor (CEDD), to produce the final local features' vectors. In order to test the new descriptors in the most straightforward fashion, we use the Bag-Of-Visual-Words framework for indexing and retrieval. The experimental results conducted on two different benchmark databases with varying codebook sizes, revealed an astonishing boost in the retrieval performance of the proposed descriptors compared both to their own performance (in their original form) and to other state-of-the-art methods of local and global descriptors. Open-source implementation of the proposed descriptors is available in c#, Java and MATLAB.