Spatio-frequency local descriptor for content based image retrieval

Abstract

This paper presents a novel feature extraction framework for content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based Local tetra pattern (LTrP) is used to obtain the feature map from an input image. Decomposition of DWT up to single level and the features obtained from it would make the CBIR system very sensitive to noise. Therefore, decomposition up to three scales is used to remove noise. On each of the sub band LTrP is applied and 130 features are extracted. Further, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is employed for index matching and image retrieval task which gives the classification accuracy of 97.9 % for Corel 1K database. We have compared our proposed feature extraction scheme with LTrP and other existing local descriptor. Results show that combination of DWT and Local Tetra Patterns (DWT + LTrP) extracts more robust features than LTrP alone. Also, the effect of different wavelet filters on the accuracy of the system has been analyzed. Proposed framework has been tested on Corel-1000 and Corel-10000 databases. We have used average retrieval rate, precision, and recall for performance measure of the CBIR system. Proposed method outperforms the retrieval rate from 75.9% using LTrP to 97.9% using proposed method on Corel 1K database. Improvement in performance measures as compared to the other existing methods evidence that, the proposed spatio-frequency local descriptor is more robust for image retrieval task.