Dissimilarity measures for content-based image retrieval

Dissimilarity measurement plays a crucial role in content-based image retrieval. In this paper, 16 core dissimilarity measures are introduced and evaluated. We carry out a systematic performance comparison on three image collections, Corel, Getty and Trecvid2003, with 7 different feature spaces. Two search scenarios are considered: single image queries based on the vector space model, and multi-image queries based on k-nearest neighbours search. A number of observations are drawn, which will lay a foundation for developing more effective image search technologies.