An Approach for the Cross Modality Content-Based Image Retrieval between Different Image Modalities

CBIR is an effective tool to search and extract image contents in a large remote sensing image database queried by an operator or end user. However, as imaging principles are different by sensors, their visual representation thus varies among image modality type. Considering images of various modalities archived in the database, image modality difference has to be tackled for the successful CBIR implementation. However, this topic has been seldom dealt with and thus still poses a practical challenge. This study suggests a cross modality CBIR (termed as the CM-CBIR) method that transforms given query feature vector by a supervised procedure in order to link between modalities. This procedure leverages the skill of analyst in training steps after which the transformed query vector is created for the use of searching in target images with different modalities. Current initial results show the potential of the proposed CM-CBIR method by delivering the image content of interest from different modality images. Despite its retrieval capability is outperformed by that of same modality CBIR (abbreviated as the SM-CBIR), the lack of retrieval performance can be compensated by employing the user's relevancy feedback, a conventional technique for retrieval enhancement.