An adaptive and efficient clustering-based approach for content-based image retrieval in image databases

The authors present a novel content based image retrieval (CBIR) approach, for image databases, based on cluster analysis. CBIR relies on the representation (metadata) of images´ visual content. In order to produce such metadata, we propose an efficient and adaptive clustering algorithm to segment the images into regions of high similarity. This approach contrasts with those that use a single color histogram for the whole image (global methods), or local color histograms for a fixed number of image cells (partition based methods). Our experimental results show that our clustering approach offers high retrieval effectiveness with low space overhead. For example, using a database of 20000 images, we obtained higher retrieval effectiveness than partition based methods with about the same space overhead of global methods, which are typically regarded as storage-wise compact