Similar Satellite Image Search using SIFT

Due to the increase of the amount of image data, the demand for searching similar images is continuously increasing. Therefore, many researches about the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) are conducted to search similar images effectively. In CBIR, it uses image contents such as color, shape, and texture for more effective retrieval. However, when we apply CBIR to satellite images which are complex and pose the difficulty in using color information, we can have trouble to get a good retrieval result. Since it is difficult to use color information of satellite images, we need image segmentation to use shape information by separating the shape of an object in a satellite image. However, because satellite images are complex, image segmentation is hard and poor image segmentation results in poor retrieval results. In this paper, we propose a new approach to search similar images without image segmentation for satellite images. To do a similarity search without image segmentation, we define a similarity of an image by considering SIFT keypoint descriptors which doesn't require image segmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed approach more effectively searches similar satellite images which are complex and pose the difficulty in using color information.