Combining multiple image descriptions for browsing and retrieval

Retrieving images from large collections using image content is an important problem, in this multimedia age. A quick content-based visual access to the stored image is capital for efficient navigation through image collections. In this paper we introduce several techniques which characterize color homogeneous object and their spatial relationships for efficient content-based image retrieval. We present a region growing technique for efficient color homogeneous objects segmentation and extend the 2-D string to an accurate description of spatial information and relationships. In order to improve content-based image retrieval, our method emphasizes several objectives, such as: automated extraction of localize coherent regions and visual features, development of techniques for fast indexing and retrieval, and querying by both features and spatial information coupled with a symbolic level of image representation. We present our flexible image retrieval system and we give some experimental results.