CBIR Approach to Building Image Retrieval Based on Linear Edge Distribution

In this paper, we propose a CBIR approach to retrieve building images. First, we use the Canny edge detector to extract edge information from the images. Secondly, the Hough transform is applied to the edge map in order to reveal the linear edge distribution in the Hough transform domain. Thirdly, by using a Band-wise matching (BWM) algorithm, we partition the Hough transform domain into a number of bands and calculate the centroid of the Hough peaks in each band. By carrying out the same aforementioned procedures on a query image and the images in the database, we measure the similarity between the centroids of the query image and the images in the database. Finally, based on the similarity measures, the CBIR system ranks the images in the database and retrieves a specified number of images with the highest rankings.