10th International Conference on Information Technology

IMAGE: Region-color based Image Retrieval Toolbox

M V Sudhamani Dept of Information Science and Engg., Siddaganga Institute of Technology, Tumkur, Karnataka, India, Pin: 572 103 E_mail: mvsudha_raj@hotmail.com Abstract
This paper discuses the region based image retrieval from databases based on the dominant color descriptor. Region color feature is extracted using Mean shift algorithm. To efficiently retrieve images a novel clusterbased R*-Tree indexing method is proposed and the efficiency is compared with R*-Tree and sequential search. Experimental results show the performance of the proposed method. The Toolbox named IMAGE is developed in JAVA and supports query-by-example.

Dr.C R Venugopal Dept. of Electronics and Communication Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engg., Mysore, Pin: 570 006 E_mail: cr_venu@yahoo.com
color descriptor. A Euclidian distance measure is used for the color descriptor.

1.1 Region-based retrieval

Region-based approach has recently become a popular research trend. Region-based retrieval systems attempt to overcome the deficiencies of color histogram and color layout search by representing images at the object-level. A region-based retrieval system applies image segmentation to decompose an image into regions, which correspond to objects if the decomposition is ideal. Most of the existing work focused on the effectiveness of retrieval mechanisms (i.e., precision and recall). While there are some work done to address the efficiency issue (i.e., speedy retrieval), most of these are compared against the brute force approach of scanning the entire feature representation. Our proposed method uses Mean shift robust clustering algorithm for segmentation of images and interested region/regions are indexed using Cluster-based R*-Tree. This is compared with R*-Tree and sequential scan and algorithm is described in section 2.

1. Introduction
Image databases are becoming popular with many applications. One of the key issues of these areas is content-based image retrieval (CBIR) which helps users to retrieve relevant images based on their contents. Color is one of the most dominant and distinguishing visual feature used for CBIR. Using color to index and search images dates back to some of the early work on color histogram [6]. Since then many variants of the histogram indexing have been proposed. Even though color histogram is widely used as color descriptor, which is easy to compute but they result in large feature vectors that are difficult to index and leads to high search and retrieval cost. Several color descriptors have been proposed recently and they try to incorporate spatial information to varying degrees. This includes compact color moments [1], [2], binary color sets [3], color coherence vector [4], and color correlogram [5]. The feature vector dimensions of typical color descriptors are quite large. The representative color descriptor is compact and it is based on the observation that the small numbers of color/colors are usually sufficient to characterize the color information in an image region. Since the descriptor captures the representative or dominant colors in a given region, we refer to it as the dominant or representative

1.2. Architecture of proposed system

Figure 1 shows architecture of a content-based image retrieval system. Two main functionalities are supported: Data insertion and Query processing. The data insertion subsystem is responsible for extracting appropriate features from images and storing them into the image database. This process is performed off-line. The query processing, intern, is organized as follows: the interface allows a user to specify a query by means of a query pattern and to visualize the retrieved similar images. The query-processing module extracts a feature vector from a query pattern and applies a metric as the Euclidean distance to evaluate the similarity between the query image and the database images. Next, it ranks the database images in a decreasing order of similarity to the

0-7695-3068-0/07 $25.00 2007 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICIT.2007.49

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query image and forwards the most similar images to the interface module. The database images are indexed according to their feature vectors to speed up retrieval and similarity computation. Note that both the data insertion and the query processing functionalities use the feature vector extraction module.

To speed-up the evaluation of range queries we describe cluster-based indexing method. This is carried out by reducing the number of candidate images, the images to be indexed on which the optimal regionmatching problem has to be solved. The procedure is as follows: 1. Given n the number of query regions, for each query region q j , find the regions belonging to cluster c j , where
j = 1,.., n . 2. For each region ri in the image database a. Find the feature vector f i , for region ri . b. For each query region q j , in the query set

i. Find query feature vector f j , for q j . ii. Find the Euclidean distance between f i and
f j using: dij =

k =1

( fik f jk ) 2 ,

Figure 1. Architecture of a proposed system

where m is the dimension of the feature vector. This score is zero if the regions features are identical, it increases as the match becomes less perfect. iii. Measure the similarity between f i and f j using ij = dij , where is the search range limit set by user. iv. If ij 0 , then f i belongs to cluster c j and go to step 2. After the completion of the above procedure, we index only representatives of c j , where j = 1,..., n using R*Tree. Once the user selects the query, we apply range search on the tree and the selected regions belonging to image are retrieved as resultant set. Members of resultant set is ranked according to overall score and return the best matches in decreasing order of similarity along with their relative information. In case of R*-Tree, all the regions in the database are being indexed. When we pose a queryby-example, based on the range, selected images are displayed as a resultant set according to ranking of similarity in descending order. In sequential search, all the regions stored in the database are compared for similarity and intern retrieved for display, making it inefficient. All three methods yield good performance when the accuracy of resultant set is considered but the proposed method over scores all the above.

2. Search and Retrieval

Each representative color descriptor F is defined to be F= {ci }, i=1,., 3, where ci is 3-D color vector of a region. Each object or region in the database is represented using color descriptor. Given a query image, similarity retrieval involves searching the database for similar color as the input query. Searching for the individual colors can be done very efficiently in a 3-D color space. We consider only fixed range queries in which the range value limits the search range.

2.1 Database design and Indexing

The User Interface is designed to provide the options of Insertion, Deletion and Retrieval of the Images from the image database. A unique image ID is assigned for each image in the database. A Unique image region ID identifies each region in the database. The entries in each index node are sorted by region ID. The proposed indexing scheme allows the database to be dynamic, allowing straightforward insertion and deletions of database entries thus avoiding the reconstruction of the entire index structure of the database.

3. Experimental Results
The representative color descriptor is tested on a database of 200 color flag images and a database of 1200

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Ground Truth images belonging to 20 various categories. After segmentation 440 regions from flag images and 1300 regions from Ground Truth images are obtained. Among them, 13 and 67 image regions containing a variety of colors are chosen from flag and Ground Truth database respectively as queries. To determine relevant matches in the database to the query image region a subjective test is carried before evaluation. The time complexity associated with proposed method (cluster-Index) and other methods (R*-Tree and Sequential search) are shown in Fig 3(a) and 3(b). As we can observe from the graph that efficiency of the proposed method is high (less time). The retrieval accuracy is measured by precision and recall. The average recall over precision graph for Ground Truth image queries is plotted in Figure 4 for all three methods. In general, a more effective system shows a higher precision for all values of recall. We can observe that the proposed method achieves good results in terms of the retrieval accuracy. Figure 2 shows the snapshot of region-based image retrieval. The retrievals in the example show good match of the query images.

Time complexity of Indexing Algorithms

0.28 0.26 0.24 0.22 0.2 0.18 0.16 0.14 0.12 0.1 0.08 0.06 0.04 0.02 0 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120 130 Number of Retrievals

Time(s)

Cluster_Index R*-Tree_Index Seqn_search

(a)
Time complexity of Indexing Algorithms
1.8 1.6 1.4 Avg. Time(s) 1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 0 10 20 30 40 50 Avg. Number of Retrievals Cluster_Index R*-Tree_Index Seqn_search

(b) Figure 3. Time in seconds versus number of retrievals (a) Flags database (b) Ground Truth image database
Avg. Recall v/s avg. Precision per category
1.1 1.05 Avg. Precision 1 0.95 0.9 0.85 0.8 0.75 0.7 0.78 0.8 0.82 0.84 0.86 0.88 0.9 0.92 0.94 0.96 0.98 1 1.02 Avg. Recall Cluster_Index R*-Tree_Index Seqn_Search

4. Conclusions
The Cluster-based R*-Tree indexing method for efficient retrieval of the images is proposed and discussed. The technique is tested on a natural image database, flag image database and ground truth database as applications. The mean shift algorithm is used for segmentation to obtain regions of interest to improve the effectiveness of the retrieval system. Experimental results depict the proposed method gives better performance in terms of efficiency and accuracy of retrieval. A query-by-example based toolbox IMAGE is implemented for the database manipulation and retrieval in JAVA. As further extension of the proposed work, the system should be tested on a more populated database.

Figure 4. Average Recall versus average Precision per category of Ground Truth database.

5. References
[1]

[2]

[3] [4]

[5]

[6]

Figure 2. Example of region-based image search

M. A. Stricker and M. Orengo, Similarity of color images, Proc. SPIE, Storage Retrieval Still Image Video Databases IV, vol. 2420, 1996, pp. 381392. M. Stricker and A. Dimai, Color indexing with weak spatial constraints, Proc. SPIE Storage Retrieval Still Image Video Databases IV, vol. 2670, 1996,pp. 2940. J. Smith and S.-F. Chang, Tools and techniques for color image retrieval, Proc. SPIE, vol. 2670, 1996. G. Pass and R. Zabih, Histogram refinement for content based image retrieval, Proc. IEEE Workshop Applications Computer Vision, pp. 96-102, 1996, pp. 27. J.Huang, S R Kumar, M Mithra, W.Zhu, and R. Zabih, Image indexing using color correlograms, Proc. IEEE conf. Computer vision and pattern Recognition, 1997,pp. 762-768. W. Y. Ma, B. Manjunath, NeTra: A toolbox for navigating large image databases, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Image Processing,1997,pp.56-71.

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