Efficient Object-based Image Retrieval Method using Color Features from Salient Regions

This paper presents an efficient object-based color image-retrieval algorithm that is suitable for the classification and retrieval of images from small to mid-scale datasets, such as images in PCs, tablets, phones, and cameras. The proposed method first finds salient regions by using regional feature vectors, and also finds several dominant colors in each region. Then, each salient region is partitioned into small sub-blocks, which are assigned 1 or 0 with respect to the number of pixels corresponding to a dominant color in the sub-block. This gives a binary map for the dominant color, and this process is repeated for the predefined number of dominant colors. Finally, we have several binary maps, each of which corresponds to a dominant color in a salient region. Hence, the binary maps represent the spatial distribution of the dominant colors in the salient region, and the union (OR operation) of the maps can describe the approximate shapes of salient objects. Also proposed in this paper is a matching method that uses these binary maps and which needs very few computations, because most operations are binary. Experiments on widely used color image databases show that the proposed method performs better than state-of-the-art and previous color-based methods.