A fast and efficient compressed domain JPEG2000 image retrieval method

In this paper we propose a fast and efficient image retrieval method for searching JPEG2000 compressed image databases. Comparing image contents of the JPEG2000 coded images in the pixel domain requires image decompression, which imposes intensive computational processes of the inverse discrete wavelet transform and the arithmetic decoding. On the other hand, the first decoding stage of the JPEG2000 standard is the packet header decoding, which is a simple process, but it provides valuable information about the code blocks in the packet. In this paper we exploit packet header information including the number of non-zero bit-planes, the number of coding passes and the code block length for comparing the JPEG2000 compressed images. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides a better performance compared to other JPEG2000 compressed domain retrieval techniques and even outperforms the pixel-based image retrieval techniques such as the Gabor filter; moreover the proposed method is very fast with very low computational load.