Cell Histograms Versus Color Histograms for Image Representation and Retrieval

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Nascimento, Mario
  • Falcao, Alexandre
  • Stehling, Renato

• Technical report TR01-01. Color is a commonly used feature for realizing content-based image retrieval (CBIR). In this context, this paper presents a new approach for CBIR which is based on well known and widely used color histograms. Previous approaches have used a single global color histogram (GCH) for the whole image, or local color histograms (LCHs) for cells within a grid of fixed size. Our proposed approach is also based on a grid of cells, but unlike the latter it uses a cell histogram for each of the colors actually present in the images, representing how that color is distributed among the image cells - thus the name \"Cell/Color Histograms\". Our experiments have shown that the actual number of colors present in images is often low. Thus we are able to achieve performanance comparable to using LCHs within a grid, but with a much smaller space overhead. Furthermore, the proposed approach is very flexible in the sense that the user may easily calibrate the trade-off between space overhead and retrieval effectiveness. In fact, we have been able to outperform GCHs (typically a compact representation) requiring less storage space. | TRID-ID TR01-01

• Date created

  2001

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Color histograms
  • Color-based image retrieval

• Type of Item

  Report

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3CR5ND7C

• License

  Attribution 3.0 International