Retinex preprocessing of uncalibrated images for color-based image retrieval

In image databases, variations in imaging conditions and preprocessing may result in similar originals that exhibit a low measure of similarity when color information is used in standard image retrieval methods. We examine the performance of various colorbased retrieval strategies to see whether, and to what degree, the effectiveness of retrieval improves with Retinex-based preprocessing, regardless of the strategy adopted. The results of experiments performed on four different databases are reported and discussed. © 2003 SPIE and IS&T. [DOI: 10.1117/1.1526844]