Masajiro Iwasaki

Image retrieval using spatial intensity features

The rapidly increasing usage of multimedia environments has led to a greater demand for image retrieval. Until recently, this retrieval has been done using keywords, which are generally added by hand to the image, and is thus inefficient. Recent studies concern the automatic extraction from the images of features that can then be used for retrieval. Humans often identify images by the colors and objects they contain, however these are insufficient for image retrieval. Humans also use structural information to identify images. Our studies focus on the structural information of the image, that is, the spatial texture feature and the spatial edge feature which consists of the primitive feature and its distribution. These features enable us to characterize images without color features and object extraction. In this paper, we show how to extract these features and how to compare the features extracted from two images. We carry out experiments on the retrieval of similar images and show the results.