Region Queries without Segmentation for Image Retrieval by Content

Content-based image retrieval is today ubiquitous in computer vision. Most systems use the query-by-example approach, performing queries such as "show me more images that look like this one". Most often, the user is more specifically interested in specifying an object (or region) and in retrieving more images with similar objects (or regions), as opposed to similar images as a whole. This paper deals with that problem, called region querying. We suggest a method that uses a multiresolution quadtree representation of the images and thus avoids the hard problem of region segmentation. Several experimental results are presented in real-world databases.