Robust color image retrieval using visual interest point feature of significant bit-planes

In this paper, we propose a robust color image retrieval method using visual interest point feature of significant bit-planes. We firstly extract the visually significant bit-plane image from the original color image according to the bit-plane theory and noise attack characteristic. And then, we extract the visual interest points from the original color image by using the significant bit-plane image and multi-scale Harris-Laplace detector, and construct the fuzzy color histogram of visual interest points. We finally compute the similarity between color images by using the fuzzy color histogram of visual interest points. Experiments on large databases show that the proposed algorithm is significantly more effective than the state-of-the-art approaches. Especially, it can retrieve the noise-attacked (including blurring, sharpening, and illumination, etc.) image effectively. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.