Query by low-quality image

The motivation for research on low-quality images comes from a requirement by some museums to respond to queries for pictorial information, submitted in the form of fax messages or other low-quality monochrome images of works of art. The museums have databases of high-resolution images of their artefact collections and the person submitting the query is asking typically whether the museum holds the artwork shown or perhaps some similar work. Often the query image will have no associated metadata and will be produced from a low-resolution picture of the original artwork. The resulting poor quality image, received by the museum, leads to very poor retrieval accuracy when the fax is used in standard query by example searches using, for example, colour, spatial colour or texture matching algorithms. We propose a special retrieval algorithm in order to improve the retrieval accuracy in query by low-quality image application and evaluate it in comparison with more conventional algorithms. Throughout this paper, fax images will be used as the main source of low-quality image for query by low-quality image experiments. Nonetheless, some other forms of low-quality image will also be considered. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.