Content based medical image retrieval based on new efficient local neighborhood wavelet feature descriptor

This paper presents a new class of local neighborhood based wavelet feature descriptor (LNWFD) for content based medical image retrieval (CBMIR). To retrieve images effectively from large medical databases is backbone of diagnosis. Existing wavelet transform based medical image retrieval methods suffer from high length feature vector with confined retrieval performance. Triplet half-band filter bank (THFB) enhanced the properties of wavelet filters using three kernels. The influence of THFB has employed in the proposed method. First, triplet half-band filter bank (THFB) is used for single level wavelet decomposition to obtain four sub-bands. Next, the relationship among wavelet coefficients is exploited at each sub-band using 3 x 3 neighborhood window to form LNWFD pattern. The novelty of the proposed descriptor lies in exploring relation between wavelet transform values of pixels rather than intensity values which gives more detail local information in wavelet sub-bands. Thus, proposed feature descriptor is robust against illumination. Manhattan distance is used to compute similarity between query feature vector and feature vector of database. The proposed method is tested for medical image retrieval using OASIS-MRI, NEMA-CT, and Emphysema-CT databases. The average retrieval precisions achieved are 71.45%, 99.51% of OASIS-MRI and NEMA-CT databases for top ten matches considered respectively and 55.51% of Emphysema-CT database for top 50 matches. The superiority in terms of performance of the proposed method is confirmed by the experimental results over the well-known existing descriptors.