Consistency Check of Image Databases

Checking the consistency of image databases is not a completely solved problem. To decide if an image has already been inserted into the database can only be checked by actually looking through the images, or using the textual descriptive keywords attached to the database items. Both the visual checking and the keyword search in a large image database may result in errors. Several methods of content-based image retrieval [3,5,6,9] and image clustering [8] are known that could be used for determining image database consistency. However; most of these have drawbacks and are sensitive for errors. Thus it seems reasonable to develop a robust, relatively fast algorithm that can identify very similar images of a large database, where very similar means that the two images are probably the same, maybe taken in different illumination conditions. The authors present their Matlab solution that has been tested on a database of 250 color flags used in [4].