A compact and efficient color descriptor for image retrieval

An important problem in color based image retrieval is the lack of efficient way to represent both the color and the spatial structure information with single descriptor. To solve this problem, a new Dominant Color Structure Descriptor (DCSD), is proposed. The descriptor combines the compactness of Dominant Color Descriptor (DCD) and the accuracy of Color Structure Descriptor (CSD) to enhance the retrieval performance in a highly efficient manner. The feature extraction and similarity measure of the descriptor are designed to address the problems of the existing descriptors such as color inaccuracy of DCD and redundancy of CSD. Experimental results show that DCSD has a significant improvement in retrieval performance and descriptor size over DCD. An eight-color DCSD (DCSD 8) gives an Averaged Normalized Modified Retrieval Rate (ANMRR) of 0.0993 using MPEG-7 common color dataset, outperforming compact configurations of Scalable Color Descriptor and Color Structure Descriptor with smaller descriptor size. © 2007 IEEE.