Automatic Categorization of Image Regions Using Dominant Color Based Vector Quantization

This paper proposes a dominant color based vector quantization algorithm that automatically categorizes image regions. In contrast to the conventional vector quantization algorithm, the new algorithm effectively handles variable feature vectors like dominant color descriptors. Furthermore, the algorithm is guided by a novel splitting and stopping criterion which is specially designed for dominant color descriptors. This criterion helps the algorithm not only to learn the number of clusters, but also to avoid unnecessary over-fragmentations of region-clusters. Experimental result shows that the proposed approach categorizes image-regions with very high accuracy.