Tools and techniques for color image retrieval

The growth of digital image and video archives is increasing the need for tools that effectively filter and efficiently search through large amounts of visual data. Towards this goal we propose a technique by which the color content of images and videos is automatically extracted to form a class of meta-data that is easily indexed. The color indexing algorithm uses the back- projection of binary color sets to extract color regions from images. This technique provides for both the automated extraction of regions and representation of their color content. It overcomes some of the problems with color histogram techniques such as high-dimensional feature vectors, spatial localization, indexing and distance computation. We present the binary color set back-projection technique and discuss its implementation in the VisualSEEk content- based image/video retrieval system for the World Wide Web. We also evaluate the retrieval effectiveness of the color set back-projection method and compare its performance to other color image retrieval methods.