Content-Based Image Retrieval using Third Order Color Object Relation

In this paper, we propose a criteria which can be applied to classify conventional color feature based Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) methods with its application areas, and a new image retrieval method which can represent sufficient spatial information in the image and is powerful in invariant searching to translation, rotation and enlargement transform. As the conventional color feature based CBIR methods can not sufficiently include the spatial information in the image, in general, they have drawbacks, which are weak to the translation or rotation, enlargement transform. To solve it, they have represented the spatial information by partitioning the image. Retrieval efficiency, however, is decreased rapidly as increasing the number of the feature vectors. We classify conventional methods to ones using 1st order relations and ones using 2nd order relations as their color object relation, and propose a new method using 3rd order relation of color objects which is good for the translation, rotation and enlargement transform. It makes quantized 24 buckets and selects 3 high scored histogram buckets and calculates 3 mean positions of pixels in 3 buckets and 3 angles. Then, it uses them as feature vectors of a given image. Experiments show that the proposed method is especially good at enlarged images and effective for its small calculation.