Adaptive region matching for region-based image retrieval by constructing region importance index

This study deals with the problem of similarity matching in region-based image retrieval (RBIR). A novel visual similarity measurement called adaptive region matching (ARM) has been developed. For decreasing negative influence of interference regions and important information loss simultaneously, a region importance index is constructed and semantic meaningful region (SMR) is introduced. Moreover, ARM automatically performs SMR-to-image matching or image-to-image matching. Extensive experiments on Corel-1000, Caltech-256 and University of Washington (UW) databases demonstrate the authors proposed ARM is more flexible and more efficient than the existing visual similarity measurements that were originally developed for RBIR.