IRM: integrated region matching for image retrieval

  • Authors:
  • Jia Li;James Z. Wang;Gio Wiederhold

  • Affiliations:
  • Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox Corporation, Palo Alto, CA;Dept. of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA and Also of Medical Informatics, Stanford University;Dept. of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

  • Venue:
  • MULTIMEDIA '00 Proceedings of the eighth ACM international conference on Multimedia
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Content-based image retrieval using region segmentation has been an active research area. We present IRM (Integrated Region Matching), a novel similarity measure for region-based image similarity comparison. The targeted image retrieval systems represent an image by a set of regions, roughly corresponding to objects, which are characterized by features reflecting color, texture, shape, and location properties. The IRM measure for evaluating overall similarity between images incorporates properties of all the regions in the images by a region-matching scheme. Compared with retrieval based on individual regions, the overall similarity approach reduces the influence of inaccurate segmentation, helps to clarify the semantics of a particular region, and enables a simple querying interface for region-based image retrieval systems. The IRM has been implemented as a part of our experimental SIMPLIcity image retrieval system. The application to a database of about 200,000 general-purpose images shows exceptional robustness to image alterations such as intensity variation, sharpness variation, color distortions, shape distortions, cropping, shifting, and rotation. Compared with several existing systems, our system in general achieves more accurate retrieval at higher speed.