Querying color images using user-specified wavelet features

In this paper, an image retrieval method based on wavelet features is proposed. Due to the superiority in multiresolution analysis and spatial-frequency localization, the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is used to extract wavelet features (i.e., approximations, horizontal details, vertical details, and diagonal details) at each resolution level. During the feature-extraction process, each image is first transformed from the standard RGB color space to the YUV space for the purpose of efficiency and ease of extracting the features based on color tones; then each component (i.e., Y, U, and V) of the image is further transformed to the wavelet domain. In the image database establishing phase, the wavelet coefficients of each image are stored; in the image retrieving phase, the system compares the wavelet coefficients of the Y, U, and V components of the query image with those of the images in the database, based on the weight factors adjusted by users, and find out good matches. To benefit from the user–machine interaction, a friendly graphic user interface (GUI) for fuzzy cognition is developed, allowing users to easily adjust weights for each feature according to their preferences. In our experiment, 1000 test images are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.

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