Retrieval of paintings using principal color information

This paper describes a method for indexing and retrieving color paintings, in which information about “principal” colors is used as key for retrieval. Several principal color regions are extracted by evaluating each region obtained by image segmentation in terms of likeliness for forming principal color regions and background color regions. Retrieval of paintings is done by just specifying principal colors used and their spatial relationships, or by specifying “impression word” that indicate the impression of the paintings. Although the method is simple, it must be useful for managing and retrieving pictures in image database system