A Perceptual Approach for Image Representation and Retrieval

Abstract

This chapter describes an approach based on human perception to content-based image representation and retrieval. We consider textured images and propose to model the textural content of images by a set of features having a perceptual meaning and their application to content-based image retrieval. We present a new method to estimate a set of perceptual textural features, namely coarseness, directionality, contrast and busyness. The proposed computational measures are based on two representations: the original images representation and the autocovariance function (associated with images) representation. The correspondence of the proposed computational measures to human judgments is shown using a psychometric method based on the Spearman rank-correlation coefficient. The set of computational measures is applied to content-based image retrieval on a large image data set, the well-known Brodatz database. Experimental results show a strong correlation between the proposed computational textural measures and human perceptual judgments. The benchmarking of retrieval performance, done using the recall measure, shows interesting results. Furthermore, results merging/fusion returned by each of the two representations is shown to allow significant improvement in retrieval effectiveness.