Interest region-based image retrieval system based on graph-cut segmentation and feature vectors

In this paper, an interest region-based image retrieval system (IRBIR) that combines similarity contributions from interest regions specified by user in images to form a single value for measuring similarity between images is proposed. The interest region-based framework utilizes the segmentation result to capture the higher-level concept of images. A novel image segmentation based on Graph-Cut is proposed for the final result. The segmentation method in this paper is fast and accurate enough for the real-time image retrieval demand than previous region-based methods. Experimental and comparison results, which are performed using a general purpose database containing 2,000 images, are encouraging.