Central Object Extraction for Object-Based Image Retrieval

An important step in content-based image retrieval is finding an interesting object within an image. We propose a method for extracting an interesting object from a complex background. Interesting objects are generally located near the center of the image and contain regions with significant color distribution. The significant color is the more frequently co-occurred color near the center of the image than at the background of the image. A core object region is selected as a region a lot of pixels of which have the significant color, and then it is grown by iteratively merging its neighbor regions and ignoring background regions. The final merging result called a central object may include different color-characterized regions and/or two or more connected objects of interest. The central objects automatically extracted with our method matched well with significant objects chosen manually.