Comparison of Several Color Histogram Based Retrieval Algorithms

As an important visual characteristic, color has been widely applied in content based image retrieval. The paper adopted the RGB color model, wherein intersection distance method, Euclidean distance method and correlation distance method based on color histogram characteristics were applied respectively in the experiments of the same sample image and the same image database. Experimental results show that the three algorithms could retrieve the sample image accurately, wherein the histogram intersection algorithm completed the retrieval most quickly; the Euclidean distance method based on simple theories can be understood easily; and the correlation distance method had the lowest recall ratio. The experimental results have certain guidance and reference values for selecting and optimizing the content based image retrieval algorithm.