Color image retrieval based on spatio-chromatic multichannel Gaussian mixture modelling

In this paper we propose a novel color image retrieval technique based on Gaussian modelling of multichannel spatio-chromatic information. The query image is represented using a number of images expressing its similarity to a set of colors derived using the median cut quantization method. Having the image decomposed into multiple channels describing its similarity to image representative colors, the dimensionality of image representation is reduced using the Principal Components Analysis (PCA). The image data, transformed to a new coordinate system forms a new, reduced in number, set of channels which are modelled using a Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) to preserve not only the color structure of the image but also its spatial color arrangement.