Image Indexing and Retrieval Based on Human Perceptual Color Clustering

We propose a new image retrieval method based on human perceptual clustering of color images. This color clustering produces for each image a small set of representative colors which captures the color properties of the image, and a small set of sizable contiguous regions which captures the spatial/geometrical properties of the image. The proposed method outperforms the traditional histogram and its improved methods not only with its richer image retrieval capabilities which cover a wider spectrum of user requirements, but also with its powerful indexing scheme which is essential to cater for large scale image databases.