Compressed domain JPEG2000 image indexing method employing full packet header information

In this paper we propose a new indexing method for comparing image contents in the JPEG2000 compressed domain. Comparing image contents of the JPEG2000 coded images in the pixel domain requires image decompression, which imposes intensive computational processes of the inverse discrete wavelet transform and the arithmetic decoding. On the other hand, the first decoding stage of the JPEG2000 standard is packet header decoding, which is a simple process, but provides valuable information about the code blocks in the packet. In this paper we use packet header information for JPEG2000 image indexing. The proposed method exploits full packet header information including the number of non-zero bit-planes, the number of coding passes and the code block length for indexing the JPEG2000 compressed images. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides a better performance compared to other JPEG2000 compressed domain indexing techniques and even outperforms the pixel-based image indexing techniques such as the Gabor filter.