Retrieving images by comparing homogeneous color and texture objects in the image

An object-based image retrieval method is addressed in this paper. For that purpose, a new image segmentation algorithm and image comparing method between segmented objects are proposed. For image segmentation, color and textural features are extracted from each pixel in the image and these features are used as inputs into VQ (Vector Quantization) clustering method, which yields homogeneous objects in terms of color and texture. In this procedure, colors are quantized into a few dominant colors for simple representation and efficient retrieval. In the retrieval case, two comparing schemes are proposed. Comparisons between one query object and multi-objects of a database image and comparisons between multi-query objects and multi-objects of a database image are proposed. For fast retrieval, dominant object colors are key-indexed into the database.