Illumination Invariance and Object Model in Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval

With huge amounts of multimedia information connected to the global information network (Internet), e cient and e ective image retrieval from large image and video repositories has become an imminent research issue. This article presents our research in the C-BIRD (Content-Based Image Retrieval in Digital-libraries) project. In addition to the use of common features such as color, texture, shape and their conjuncts, and the combined content-based and description-based techniques, it is shown that (a) color{channel{normalization enables Search by Illumination Invariance, and (b) feature localization and a three-step matching algorithm (color hypothesis, texture support, shape veri cation) facilitate Search by Object Model in image and video databases.