An approach for improving the performance of the Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR)

Amid rapidly increasing imagery inputs and their volume in a remote sensing imagery database, Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is an effective tool to search for an image feature or image content of interest a user wants to retrieve. It seeks to capture salient features from a 'query' image, and then to locate other instances of image region having similar features elsewhere in the image database. For a CBIR approach that uses texture as a primary feature primitive, designing a texture descriptor to better represent image contents is a key to improve CBIR results. For this purpose, an extended feature vector combining the Gabor filter and co-occurrence histogram method is suggested and evaluated for quantitywise and qualitywise retrieval performance criterion. For the better CBIR performance, assessing similarity between high dimensional feature vectors is also a challenging issue. Therefore a number of distance metrics (i.e. L1 and L2 norm) is tried to measure closeness between two feature vectors, and its impact on retrieval result is analyzed. In this paper, experimental results are presented with several CBIR samples. The current results show that 1) the overall retrieval quantity and quality is improved by combining two types of feature vectors, 2) some feature is better retrieved by a specific feature vector, and 3) retrieval result quality (i.e. ranking of retrieved image tiles) is sensitive to an adopted similarity metric when the extended feature vector is employed.