An Approach to Image Retrieval for Image Databases

In this paper, a method is discussed to store and retrieve images eeciently from an image database on the basis of the data structure called E() representation. The E() representation is a spatial knowledge representation preserving the spatial information between objects embedded in symbolic images as an iconic index for the purpose of eecient image retrieval. The image retrieval method is invariant under, at least, the aane transformation (i.e. translation, rotation and scale) and is able to deal with substantial object occlusion. A metric is deened to express similarity between symbolic images. Initial experiments carried out for two applications show that the image retrieval method is very eecient and robust to similarity retrieval in image databases. Together with the inherent high parallelism, it makes the method a promising image retrieval method.