C-BIRD: content-based image retrieval from digital libraries using illumination invariance and recognition kernel

With huge amounts of multimedia information connected to the global information network (Internet), efficient and effective image retrieval from large image and video repositories has become an imminent research issue. This article presents our research in the C-BIRD (Content-Based Image Retrieval from Digital libraries) project. In addition to the use of common features such as keywords, color texture, shape and their conjuncts, it is shown that (a) the color-channel-normalization enables search by illumination invariance, and (b) the multi-level recognition kernel facilitates search by object model in image and video databases