Improving image retrieval performance by using both color and texture features

Most content-based image retrievals (CBIR) use color as image features. However, image retrieval using color features often gives disappointing results because in many cases, images with similar colors do not have similar content. Color methods incorporating spatial information have been proposed to solve this problem, however, these methods often result in very high dimensions of features which drastically slow down the retrieval speed. In this paper, a method combining both color and texture features of image is proposed to improve the retrieval performance. Given a query, images in the database are firstly ranked using color features. Then, the top ranked images are re-ranked according to their texture features. Results show the second process improves retrieval performance significantly.