• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.28 no.7C
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• pp.719-725
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• 2003

The content-based image retrieval system extracts features of color, shape and texture from raw images, and builds the database with those features in the indexing process. The search in the whole retrieval system is defined as a process which finds images that have large similarity to query image using the feature database. This paper proposes a new two-stage search method in the content-based image retrieval system. The method is that the features are condensed and stored by the property of Cauchy-Schwartz inequality in order to reduce the similarity computation time which takes a mostly response time from entering a query to getting retrieval results. By the extensive computer simulations, we have observed that the proposed two-stage search method successfully reduces the similarity computation time while maintaining the same retrieval relevance as the conventional exhaustive search method. We also have observed that the method is more effective as the number of images and dimensions of the feature space increase.