Color-Based Image Retrieval Using Perceptually Modified Hausdorff Distance

In most content-based image retrieval systems, the color information is extensively used for its simplicity and generality. Due to its compactness in characterizing the global information, a uniform quantization of colors, or a histogram, has been the most commonly used color descriptor. However, a cluster-based representation, or a signature, has been proven to be more compact and theoretically sound than a histogram for increasing the discriminatory power and reducing the gap between human perception and computer-aided retrieval system. Despite of these advantages, only few papers have broached dissimilarity measure based on the cluster-based nonuniform quantization of colors. In this paper, we extract the perceptual representation of an original color image, a statistical signature by modifying general color signature, which consists of a set of points with statistical volume. Also we present a novel dissimilarity measure for a statistical signature called Perceptually Modified Hausdorff Distance (PMHD) that is based on the Hausdorff distance. In the result, the proposed retrieval system views an image as a statistical signature, and uses the PMHD as the metric between statistical signatures. The precision versus recall results show that the proposed dissimilarity measure generally outperforms all other dissimilarity measures on an unmodified commercial image database.