Empirical evaluation of MPEG-7 XM color descriptors in content-based retrieval of semantic image categories

This paper conducts an empirical evaluation of MPEG-7 visual part of experimentation model (XM) color descriptors in a challenging problem of content-based retrieval of semantic image categories. The performance of the four color descriptors provided in the current XM reference implementation, Color Layout, Color Structure, Dominant Color and Scalable Color is compared to that of HSV autocorrelogram, which has done well in recent empirical studies. Experimental results show that Color Structure provides best retrieval accuracy, whereas the computationally most expensive descriptor Dominant Color is worst in this problem.