A New Angle-Based Spatial Modeling for Query by Visual Thesaurus Composition

Querying by visual thesaurus (VT) is a novel paradigm for content-based image retrieval approaches for it gives the user the possibility, in case of inappropriate starting example, to compose his query by arranging the visual patches of the starting "page zero" according to his mental image. A refinement of the willed results can be achieved by inducing a spatial description within the retrieval procedure. This paper presents a novel approach to model the spatial relations between the visual patches.We define the weighted angle spatial histogram (WASH) that combines the angular computation between pairs of regions of interest and their respective topological regularity/irregularity. WASH has shown great robustness to region shape and scale in the image because segmented regions are considered as a composition of elementary relevant and minor subregions. We tested our approach on generic database, and we compared it with other state-of-the-art techniques.