Visual attention for content based image retrieval

A new image retrieval method, based on human visual attention models, called query by saliency content retrieval (QSCR) is presented in this paper. Each image is segmented and a set of characteristic features is evaluated for each region. The saliency for each image region, as it would be perceived by a human observer, is estimated for each region and then used for image retrieval. Images displaying similar features and characterized by similar saliency are then retrieved from the database. Both local and global saliency are considered in the retrieval process. The proposed method ranks the similarity between the query and the a set of given images using the Earth Mover Distance algorithm.