FIRST: Fractal Indexing and Retrieval SysTem for Image Databases

We present an image indexing method and a system to perform content-based retrieval in heterogeneous image databases (IDB). The method is based upon the fractal framework of the iterated function systems (IFS) widely used for image compression. The image index is represented through a vector of numeric features, corresponding to contractive functions (CF) of the IFS framework. The construction of the index vector requires a preliminary processing of the images to select an appropriate set of indexing features (i.e. contractive functions). The latter will be successively used to fill in the vector components, computed as frequencies by which the selected contractive functions appear inside the images. In order to manipulate the index vectors efficiently we use discrete Fourier transform (DFT) to reduce their cardinalities and use a spatial access method (SAM), like R*-tree, to improve search performances. The sound theoretical framework underlying the method enabled us to formally prove some properties of the index. However, for a complete validation of the indexing method, also in terms of effectiveness and efficacy, we performed several experiments on a large collection of images from different domains, which revealed good system performances with a low percentage of false alarms and false dismissals. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.