Content-based Image Retrieval using Visual Attention Point Features

One of the challenges in the development of a content-based image indexing and retrieval application is to achieve an efficient and robust indexing scheme. Color is a fundamental image feature used in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems. This paper proposes a robust and effective image retrieval scheme, which is based on the weighed color histogram of visual attention points. Firstly, the fully affine invariant visual attention points are extracted from the origin color image by using the Affine-SIFT (scale-invariant feature transform) detector. Secondly, according to the color complexity measure (CCM) theory, the visual weight values for the significant visual attention points are calculated to reflect the image local variation. Then, the weighed color histogram of visual attention points is constructed. Finally, the similarity between color images is computed by using the weighed color histogram of visual attention points. Experimental results show that the proposed image retrieval is not only more accurate and efficient in retrieving the user-interested images, but also yields higher retrieval accuracy than some state-of-the-art image retrieval schemes for various test DBs.