Object-oriented approach to design a content-based image retrieval model

The objective of this article is to offer both an image description model in three levels and an adapted image retrieval process. The proposed model allows the description of: the image globally with a classical manner (a list of concepts); the objects separately contained in the image (component objects); and relations between the component objects. This allows more semantic aspects of the image structure to be expressed. It is also possible to use fuzzy information in each level of the description. To build this model, we used the concepts of the object-oriented approach: generalization/specialization, aggregation, and inheritance. This approach is born from a strong need expressed in several fields such as medicine, CAD/CAM, architecture, and the teledetection industry, to be able to retrieve and describe images, their component objects, and the relations between them more precisely, with their own vocabulary and concepts.