Shape measures for content based image retrieval: A comparison

A great deal of work has been done on the evaluation of information retrieval systems for alphanumeric data. The same thing can not be said about the newly emerging multimedia and image database systems. One of the central concerns in these systems is the automatic characterization of image content and retrieval of images based on similarity of image content. In this paper, we discuss effectiveness of several shape measures for content based similarity retrieval of images. The different shape measures we have implemented include outline based features (chain code based string features, Fourier descriptors, UNL Fourier features), region based features (invariant moments, Zernike moments, pseudo-Zernike moments), and combined features (invariant moments & Fourier descriptors, invariant moments & UNL Fourier features). Given an image, all these shape feature measures (vectors) are computed automatically, and the feature vector can either be used for the retrieval purpose or can be stored in the database for future queries. We have tested all of the above shape features for image retrieval on a database of 500 trademark images. The average retrieval efficiency values computed over: a set of fifteen representative queries for all the methods is presented. The output of a sample shape similarity query using all the features is also shown. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.