Texture-based pattern retrieval from image databases

Recent technological advances have made it possible to process and store large amounts of image data. Perhaps the most impressive example is the accumulation of image data in scientific applications such as medical or satellite imagery. However, in order to realize their full potential, tools for efficient extraction of information and for intelligent searches in image databases need to be developed. This paper describes a new approach to image data retrieval which allows queries to be composed of local intensity patterns. The intensity pattern is converted into a feature representation of reduced dimensionality which can be used for searching similar-looking patterns in the database. This representation is obtained by filtering the pattern with a bank of scale and orientation selective filters modeled using Gabor functions. Experimental results are presented which illustrate that the proposed representation preserves the perceptual similarities, and provides a powerful tool for content-based image retrieval.