Poster Paper

Proc. of Int. Conf. on Advances in Computer Engineering 2011

Retrieval of Color Image using Color Correlogram and

Wavelet Filters
Dipankar Hazra
Dr.B.C.Roy Engineering College, Durgapur, India
Email: dipankar1998@rediffmail.com
pixels. Local histogram of each cell of query image is
computed and compared with local histogram of same cell of
database image. Another approach of color based image
retrieval is color texture moments [3]. But Color Correlogram
[4]-[8] outperform all the previous approaches. Texture
features produce perfect result for regular textured color
images. Hence we also incorporate texture feature for image
retrieval where color correlogram fails. Among the texture
analysis method gray level co-occurance matrix or GLCM by
Haralick [9], gabor wavelet [10], Haar wavelet [11], Daubechies
wavelets [12] are widely used. Rotated wavelet filters [12],
[13] are constructed from Daubechies wavelets and used with
Daubechies wavelet to extract the diagonal textures and
increase the retrieval accuracy of the wavelet. Ref. [14] shows
that combination of color of texture features can be used as
efficient and accurate image retrieval technique.

Abstract- Objective of this paper is to develop a color image

indexing and retrieval system using color correlogram and
wavelet filters. Color, Texture and shape are the three main
features of image retrievals. Among them color feature is
mainly used for color image retrieval. Color correlogram is
used as the color feature in this paper. It gives better result
than another commonly used color feature such as color
histogram. Daubechies 4 wavelet is used for texture based
image retrieval. Rotated Wavelet Filter recognizes diagonal
textures better than Daubechies 4 Wavelet Filter. In this paper
combined wavelet approach is used as texture feature to
increase the retrieval accuracy of the algorithm. It
distinguishes the color image with regular texture feature.
Experimental result demonstrates that combination of color
correlogram and wavelet filters gives more accurate result
than using color correlogram for image retrieval and browsing.
Keywords: Content based image retrieval, image indexing, color
correlogram, autocorrelogram, rotated wavelet filter, color
retrieval, texture retrieval.

II. RELATED WORKS

Histogram does not give spatial correlation among color
changes. But color correlogram expresses different colors
and how spatial correlation of color changes with distance.
But same color different texture images color correlogram
fails. Hence Wavelet Filter, which is popular for its MRA
capability, is used for texture recognition in those cases.
Wavelet Features are proved to be more accurate than Tamura
and Haralick features. Rotated Wavelet Filter is used for
diagonal texture recognition.

I. INTRODUCTION
Content Based Image Retrieval is one of the most
powerful research areas nowadays. Searching a database of
millions of images is a difficult task and lots of time is required
for that. To reduce the search time one can use indexes like
the indexes to search in the book. Different features are used
for indexing and retrieval of images. Color, texture and shape
are the most powerful features. Feature vectors of various
types of images are calculated and stored as indexes of the
images. Feature vector of the query image is calculated and
compared with those index values for nearest image matching.
Still any of the existing method can not give complete
accuracy. This work tries to improve the accuracy of the
existing method. For color images with irregular texture color
is the most important feature used for indexing and retrieval.
There are different method for color feature based image
retrieval. Pixel to pixel comparison was initially used as color
based image retrieval. But this approach was computation
expensive and very sensitive to camera and light position.
Global histogram processing [1] is a popular approach. A
histogram is a plot of the number of pixels belonging to each
specific set of colors. If the difference between global
histogram of query image and same of database image falls
below certain threshold, the images are considered to be
similar. Major drawback of global histogram processing is it
does not give any information about spatial distribution of
colors. Local histogram processing [2] gives information
about spatial distribution of colors. Images are partitioned
into fixed number of rectangular cells containing fixed number
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A. Color Correlogram
Correlogram can be stored as a table indexed by pairs of
colors (i,j) where d-th entry shows the probability of finding
a pixel j from pixel i at distance d. Whereas an auto-correlogram
can be stored as a table indexed by color i where d-th entry
shows the probability of finding a pixel i from the same pixel
at distance d. Hence auto-correlogram shows the spatial
correlation between identical colors only. Experiment shows
that correlogram and auto-correlogram both are computational
expensive. Hence we use correlogram with small number of
color and distance value which still yields very good result
without increasing the computational cost.
Let [D] denote a set of D fixed distances {d1,,, dD}. Then
d
the correlogram c c ( I ) of the image I is defined for color
i, j

pair (ci, cj ) at a distance d.

(1)
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Proc. of Int. Conf. on Advances in Computer Engineering 2011

The auto-correlogram

cdi ( I ) of the image I is defined for

color Ci at a distance d.
The image is divided into 4 subbands by applying
Daubechies 4 Filter. These subbands are labeled LL1(LowLow), LH1(Low-High), HL1(High-Low) and HH1(High-High).
LH1, HL1, and HH1 are mostly sparse as the most of the
images are low-frequency oriented. LL1 band further
decomposed to get next level of wavelet coefficients. This
results into two level wavelet decomposition as shown in
Fig.2. This process is continued until some final scale is
reached. Energy of all subbands at multiple resolutions
combined to calculate feature vector of the image.

Example: Two sample images of size 4x4 are shown in Fig.1. 2color 2-distance correlogram matrix for image1 and image 2 is
shown in Table I. Though histograms of both images are
same, due to different spatial distribution correlogram of two
images are different.

C.

Rotated Wavelet
Rotated wavelet filters can be constructed by rotating
Daubechies 4 wavelet filters. Low-High and High-Low
subbands of Rotated Wavelet Filters contain diagonal
information. This diagonal information along with horizontal
and vertical characteristics obtained from standard
Daubechies 4 wavelets give higher retrieval rate in texture
recognition application. Energy of these two subbands at
multiple resolutions has been considered.

Fig. 1 Sample images: image1, image2

TABLE I.
2-COLOR 2-DISTANCE CORRELOGRAM MATRIX

III. PROPOSED APPROACH

Proposed approach can be divided into two phase, storing
phase and query phase.
A.. Storing Phase
For an 8 bit RGB image, the number of possible colors are
(28)3=16,777,216. Calculating correlogram for so many colors
are space and time consuming. Hence the RGB image is
converted into indexed image. An indexed image is consisting
of two components: a color map matrix and a data matrix of
integers. The length of the color map matrix is equal to number
of color it defines. In our case it is 8. Each row contains three
columns for Red, Green and Blue values for pixel. Data matrix
use as an index to the color map matrix. For image of size
64x64, maximum distance is 63 between two pixels. But it has
been seen local correlation is more important than correlation
with larger distances. Hence to reduce the space and time
complexity correlogram is calculated is for 8 colors and 8
distances. The size of the color correlogram is O(m2d). In this
case the size is (82)8=512. This can be stored as a feature
vector of size 512.

Fig.2 Sample 2-level Image Decomposition

B.

Daubechies Wavelet
Wavelet is used for detecting texture of an image. The
most known family of orthogonal wavelets is a family of
Daubechies. Daubechies wavelets are more popular due to
their relations to multiresolution analysis (MRA). Coarse
texture patterns manifests peaks at the lower frequencies.
The fine texture patterns manifest peaks at the higher
frequencies of the spectrum. The spectrum also indicates the
directionality of the textures. The implementation of a wavelet
is possible using two kinds of filters-g(high pass) and h(low
pass). A pair of filters is used to divide the frequency in
subbands. This is repeated recursively till the lowest
frequency band of the image is reached. Downsampling is
used to ensure that the size of the input image remain same.
The basis vectors of Daubechies 4 wavelet are

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Algorithm: m-color n-distance Correlogram as onedimensional feature vector

For i=1 to m*m*d
{Initialize Feature Vector F[i]=0;}
For every X position in Image {
For every Y position in Image {
Val1=Value of current pixel;
Count (Val1) = Count(Val1)+1;
For Neighbor_of_X=(X-d) to (X+d){
For Neighbor_of_Y=(Y-d) to (Y+d){
Distance=Max(|X-neighbor_of_X|+
|Y-neighbor_of_Y|);
Val2=Value of Neighbor Pixel;
If (Distance>0){
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Proc. of Int. Conf. on Advances in Computer Engineering 2011
F[(Distance-1)*m*m+Val1*m+Val2+1)
= F[(Distance-1)*m*m+Val1*m+Val2+1)+1

B.

Query Phase
The feature vector of the query image is compared with
the feature vector of the database image. Let x and y are ddimensional Feature vectors of two images.
x = [x1 x2 x3 xd]
y = [y1 y2 y3 .yd]
Distance between x, y is calculated using Canberra distance
[12]. Canberra distance is given by,

}
}
}
};
For Distance= 1 to d{
For Val1=0 to m{
For Val2=0 to m{
F[(Distance-1)*m*m+Val1*m+Val2+1)
= F[(Distance-1)*m*m+Val1*m+Val2+1)
/count(Val1+1);
}
}
}

The numerator denotes the difference value, whereas

denominator normalizes the difference. The difference value
never exceeds one. If the distance between feature vector of
the query image and feature vector of an image from the
image database is falls below certain threshold we call the
query image is similar to the database image. A query image
may be similar to many database images. If more than certain
percentages of images are of same type, we say query image
is an image of that specific type. If distance between query
image and any image of image database does not fall below
threshold or ratio of one similar type of images and all similar
type of images is less than certain percentage then the query
image is not properly classified. In this case attempt is made
to classify it by texture recognition in a same way as color
based recognition.

For texture feature intensity values I of the pixels are calculated using red r , green g and blue b values of pixels using
following formula,
Discrete Wavelet Transform of each image is performed with
the intensity values up to 5 th level. Energy of each subbands
(LL, LH, HL, HH) are calculated and stored in feature vector.
Similarly Rotated Wavelet Transform of each image is
performed up to 5 th level. Energy of LH and HL subbands
are calculated and stored in the feature vector. Hence length
of the feature vector is 5x4 (For DWT) + 5x2 (For RWF) = 30.
The formula of calculating energy of a subband is,

Fig.3 Data Flow Diagram of proposed approach

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IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULT

REFERENCES

VisText color image database [15] is used for experiment.

Images downloaded from the online Google search engine
with various keywords in various categories such as sky,
water are also included for forming image database. Total no
of images used in this experiments are 84 and 10 categories of
images are used. 21 sub images of size 6464 are obtained
from each image to form the color image database. Various
categories are: sky, water, brick, bark, grass, sand, food, flower,
tile and fabric. Query image of this 10 different categories are
tested to check if they are falling on the same category or
not. Table II shows that combination of color correlogram
and rotated wavelet filter approach gives better accuracy
than only color correlogram approach. But for different
categories of images accuracy rate is different. It is
demonstrated in Table III.

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TABLE II.
ACCURACY TABLE FOR DIFFERENT METHOD

TABLE III.
ACCURACY TABLE FOR DIFFERENT CATEGORIES OF
IMAGES

V. CONCLUSION
In this work combination of color and texture feature are
used for image recognition. This work proves that combined
features (color, texture) gives better result than single features
to capture individual properties of single object in image. For
color based recognition color correlogram is used and for
texture based recognition energy feature of standard
Daubechies 4 wavelet and rotated wavelet are used. Color
correlogram considers spatial relationship of colors which is
the major drawback of histogram method. Rotated Wavelet
Filter is used to extract directional texture information along
with horizontal and vertical texture extracted by standard
Daubechies 4 wavelets. Further research can be done by
incorporating extra features. Also different distance measures
can be compared to improve accuracy of this approach.

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