Scalable Color Image Indexing and Retrieval Using Vector Wavelets

This paper presents a scalable content-based image indexing and retrieval system based on vector wavelet coefficients of color images. Highly decorrelated wavelet coefficient planes are used to acquire a search efficient feature space. The feature space is subsequently indexed using properties of all the images in the database. Therefore the feature key of an image does not only correspond to the content of the image itself but also how much the image is different from the other images being stored in the database. The search time linearly depends on the number of images similar to the query image and is independent of the database size. We show that in a database of 5000 images, query search takes less than 30 msec, on a 266 MHz Pentium II processor compared to several seconds of retrieval time in the earlier systems proposed in the literature.