Content Based Medical Image Retrieval by Combining Rotation Invariant Contourlet Features and Fourier Descriptors

Designing and modeling methods for medical image search is a challenging task. Content based medical image retrieval, which aims at searching the image database using invariant features, is an important research area for manipulating large amount of medical image databases. This paper focuses on the problem of texture and shape feature extraction. A novel approach by successfully combining rotation invariant contourlet transform and Fourier descriptors is proposed. Rotation invariant contourlet transform is used for texture feature extraction and Fourier descriptor extracts shape features. The retrieval performance of this method is tested using a large medical image database and measured using commonly used performance measurement. Index Terms—CBIR, Rotation invariant contourlet transform, Fourier descriptor, Feature extraction, Similarity measure.