Image Retrieval Based on Bit-Plane Distribution Feature

Based on the analysis of color histogram for image retrieval, a new descriptor, bit-plane distribution feature (BPDF), is proposed in this paper. The image is firstly divided into eight bit-planes. Meantime, the Gray code of bit-planes is used to avoid the effect of changes in the intensity values on bit-planes. Then, according to the distribution of each bit-plane, a feature vector is constructed by the first four significant planes which contain most of the structural information of the image. Finally, the Mahalanobis distance is adopted to measure the similarity because of the correlation between the concerned vectors after designing a correlation-weighted matrix. Comparisons are conducted between BPDF and other descriptors. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides more significantly retrieval results than the traditional ones.