An indexing and retrieval mechanism for complex similarity queries in image databases

Abstract

A content-based image retrieval mechanism to support complex similarity queries is presented. The image content is defined by three kinds of Features: quantifiable features describing the visual information, nonquantifiable features describing the semantic information, and keywords describing more abstract semantic information. In correspondence with these feature sets, we construct three types of indexes: visual indexes, semantic indexes, and keyword indexes. Index structures are elaborated to provide effective and efficient retrieval of images based on their contents. The underlying index structure used for all indexes is the HG-tree. In addition to the HG-tree, the signature file and hashing technique are also employed to index keywords and semantic features. The proposed indexing scheme combines and extends the HG-tree, the signature file, and the hashing scheme to support complex similarity queries. We also propose anew evaluation strategy to process the complex similarity queries. Experiments have been carried out on large image collections to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed retrieval mechanism. (C) 1999 Academic Press.