Content-Based Image Retrieval

)CBIR(
 What is CBIR
• Content-based image retrieval, a technique which
uses visual contents to search images from large
scale image databases according to users'
interests, has been an active and fast advancing
research area since the 1990s.
• region-histogram features to retrieve the
images according to an example query image
supplied by the user.
• Histogram is a measure used to describe the
image. In simple words it means the distribution
of color brightness across the image. The
brightness values range in [0..255].

• Region based means that the histogram measure is

not taken globally for the whole image, but locally
for different image regions. This region-histogram
features were used as index of the image database.

• Weighting for the regions. The closer the part to

image center – the higher its weight in similarity
measure.
General CBIR system works according to the following
schema :

In our CBIR system we implemented all the parts

except the one of relevance feedback.
Visual content description: since we using histogram of image,
we transform the file of the image to its bitmap representation.
That means 2D array where each cell contains
a triple with the RGB brightness values for the colors

•Red,
•Green,
•Blue.
 Feature Vector
 Feature vectors: In our system, for generality
purposes we assume that the images are of fixed
size 200*200 pixels. (If not our system converts
them to that size). We use local histogram values.
The image is divided into N * N square areas, and
then the histogram computed in each area.Each
area is of size (200/N)*(200/N) pixels .Each
image is represented with N*N length vector
where each coordinate is the histogram in the
appropriate area. More precisely: and .
Similarity comparison: for a similarity comparison we
used the Minkowski distance. Minkowski distance
between 2 images I and J is denoted as: while we started
our research when p=2.
Indexing and retrieval: for all images that are in the
databases the feature vector is pre-computed and stored as
index in file. When retrieval should be made, the image
with the least Minkowski (most similar images) distance
between query image and image from database is
returned.
• Conclusions:
• As we thought at the beginning – Histogram is quite primitive and insufficient
way for CBIR purposes. However, with certain image characteristics it may be
useful, and works well. For example on the military ceremony and the nature
images.
• Another important foundation we made is that one of our initial assumptions
was wrong. It is that dividing the image into many area , does not always
improve the results of retrieval. In case of too many divisions, it degrades the
results. The reason for that is that while comparing small parts, that are
corresponding between the images and are at fixed place, they can be different.
But if the same picture can be shifted, and not be found! The method is not
shift invariant!
• In some cases , small division (4 areas) did help. For example on the image of
Barcelona it moved a similar shifted building up 1 in rank.
• The "Minkowski distance" that was changed several times during our
experiments did not make dramatic changes, but moved some further images
close when P is enlarged.
• May be used to tuning when similar content image exists, but is not ranked top.
Enlarging P in that case can "push" its rank higher.
• References:
– Dr. Fuhui Long, Dr. Hongjiang Zhang and Prof.
David Dagan Feng. Content Based Image Retrieval.
– Dr. Fuhui Long, Dr. Hongjiang Zhang and Prof.
David Dagan Feng . An Effective Region-Based Image
Retrieval Framework
– Yossi Rubner, Carlo Tomasi, and Leonidas J. Guibas
The Earth Mover's Distance as a
Metric for Image Retrieval