Region-based image retrieval using color-size features of watershed regions

This paper presents a region-based image retrieval system that provides a user interface for helping to specify the watershed regions of interest within a query image. We first propose a new type of visual features, called color-size feature, which includes color-size histogram and moments, to integrate color and region-size information of watershed regions. Next, we design a scheme of region filtering that is based on color-size histogram to fast screen out some of most irrelevant regions and images for the preprocessing of the image retrieval. Our region-based image retrieval system applies the Earth Mover’s Distance in the design of the similarity measure for image ranking and matching. Finally, we present some experiments for the color-size feature, region filtering, and retrieval results that demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed system. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.