Content based image retrieval techniques – Issues, analysis and the state of the art

The revolutionary internet and digital technologies have imposed a need to have a system to organize abundantly available digital images for easy categorization and retrieval. The need to have a versatile and general purpose content based image retrieval (CBIR) system for a very large image database has attracted focus of many researchers of information-technology-giants and leading academic institutions for development of CBIR techniques. These techniques encompass diversified areas, viz. image segmentation, image feature extraction, representation, mapping of features to semantics, storage and indexing, image similarity-distance measurement and retrieval making CBIR system development a challenging task. The paper addresses and analyses challenges & issues of CBIR techniques/systems, evolved during recent years covering various methods for segmentation; edge, boundary, region, color, texture, and shape based feature extraction; object detection and identification. The state of the art techniques are reviewed and future scope is cited.