Spatial statistics for content based image retrieval

A content based image retrieval (CBIR) system retrieves relevant images from an image database. Over the years, several methods have been proposed to extract these features. Previous researches show that the effectiveness of a CBIR system increases when spatial relationship of colours is considered. In this paper we propose using the Looseness parameter from geostat, a branch of statistics which deals with geographical data, to describe the global spatial relationship of colours. Spatial chromatic histogram (SCH) is another method which also measures the global spatial relationship of colours. However, the spatial measurement of SCH is size variant, the spatial measurement of geostat is size invariant. We analyse and compare the performance of geostat and SCH.