Morphological Description of Color Images for Content-Based Image Retrieval

Placed within the context of content-based image retrieval, we study in this paper the potential of morphological operators as far as color description is concerned, a booming field to which the morphological framework, however, has only recently started to be applied. More precisely, we present three morphology-based approaches, one making use of granulometries independently computed for each subquantized color and two employing the principle of multiresolution histograms for describing color, using respectively morphological levelings and watersheds. These new morphological color descriptors are subsequently compared against known alternatives in a series of experiments, the results of which assert the practical interest of the proposed methods.