International Journal of Computer Science and Communication

Vol. 2, No. 2, July-December 2011, pp. 641-643

A BSTRA C T
CONTENT BASED IMAGE RETRIEVAL BY COMPARING COLOR AND SHAPE FEATURES
Pooja Verma
1
and Manish Mahajan
2
1
Research Scholar (M. Tech.), Information Technology Department,
Chandigarh Engineering College Landran, Mohali, Punjab, India.
E-mail: pooja_10oct@yahoo.co.in
2
Assistant Professor Supervisor, Information Technology Department,
Chandigarh Engineering College Landran, Mohali, Punjab, India.
In this, the performance comparison between shape & color features in content-based image retrieval is studied.
There is a great need for developing an efficient technique for finding the images. In order to find an image, image has
to be represented with certain features. In this paper I propose an efficient image retrieval technique which uses
dynamic dominant color, and shape features of an image. The rapid expansion of digital data content has led to the
need for rich descriptions and efficient Retrieval Tool.
Keywords: Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), Canny Edge Detection Algorithm (CED), Sobel Edge Detection
Algorithm, Intensity Scale Measurement.
1. INTRODUCTION
Content based image retrieval (CBIR) is a technique in
which images are indexed by extracting their low level
features and image retrieval is only based upon these
indexed image features [1, 5]. In an effective image
retrieval system, the user poses a query and the system
should find images that are somehow relevant to the
query. Thus, a way of representing the query, a way of
representing images, and a way of comparing a query
and an image are needed. This kind of approach is
known as querying by content.
2. COLOR FEATURE
The color feature is one of the most widely used visual
features in image retrieval. Because the human vision
system is more sensitive to color information than grey
values of images [3]. Generally color features are
extracted using the color histogram technique [4]. The
main issues regarding the use of color histograms for
indexing involve the choice of color space and
quantization of the color space. When a perceptually
uniform color space is chosen uniform quantization may
be appropriate.
, ,
( , , ) Prob( , , )
A B C
h a b c N A a B b C c
In these studies the developments of the extraction
algorithms follow a similar progression:
(1) Selection of a color space,
(2) Quantization of the color space,
Figure 1: The Image Dissimilarity and Their Respective Graphs
HISTOGRAM-BASED IMAGE SEARCH
International Journal of Computer Science and Communication (IJCSC)
642
(3) Computation of histograms,
(4) Derivation of the histogram distance function,
(5) Identification of indexing shortcuts.
3. SHAPE FEATURE
Shape is an important and most powerful feature used
for image classification, indexing and retrievals. Shape
information extracted using histogram of edge detection.
The edge information in the image is obtained by using
the canny edge detection [5]. In shape, the two edge
detection techniques are used in that the comparison
between both of these techniques has done. Shape
representations can be generally divided into two
categories:
Boundary-based, and
Region-based.
Figure 2: Boundary-based and Region-based Images
4. SOBEL EDGE DETECTION TECHNIQUE
The Sobel operator performs a 2-D spatial gradient
measurement on an image. There is applying convolution
K to pixel group p can be represented as:
1 1
1 1
( , ) ( , ) ( , )
k j
N x y K j k p x j y k

The Sobel Edge Detector uses two convolution
kernels, one to detect changes in vertical contrast (h
x
)
and another to detect horizontal contrast (h
y
). The Sobel
Edge Detector uses two convolution kernels, one to
detect changes in vertical contrast (h
x
) and another to
detect horizontal contrast (h
y
).
1 0 1 1 2 1
2 0 2 , 0 0 0
1 0 1 1 2 1
x y
h h
1 1
1 1

1 1
1 1
] ]
Typically it is used to find the approximate absolute
gradient magnitude at each point in an input grayscale
image. Steps:
The Sobel edge detector uses a pair of 33
convolution masks, one estimating the gradient in
the x-direction (columns) and the other estimating
the gradient in the y-direction (rows).
A convolution mask is usually much smaller than
the actual image. As a result, the mask is slid over
the image, manipulating a square of pixels at a
time.
If we define A as the source image, and Gx and Gy
are two images which at each point contain the
horizontal and vertical derivative approximations,
then the masks are as follows:
The magnitude of the gradient is then
Calculated using the formula:
2 2
| G G x G y +
An approximate magnitude can be calculated
using:
|G| = |Gx| + |Gy|
5. CANNY EDGE DETECTION TECHNIQUE
Canny edge detector discovers the optimal edges. In this
situation, an optimal edge detector means it should
mark all possible edges .marked edges are visited only
once and possibly are the only edges not any false data.
Steps:
The Canny edge detector uses a filter based on the
first derivative of a Gaussian.
It is prone to noise present on raw unprocessed
image data, so to begin with, the raw image is
convolved with a Gaussian filter.
Result is a slightly blurred version of the original
which is not affected by a single noisy pixel to any
significant degree. Smaller filters cause less
blurring, and allow detection of small, sharp lines.
An edge in an image may point in a variety of
directions, so the Canny algorithm uses four filters
to detect horizontal, vertical and diagonal edges
in the blurred image.
Figure 3: Retrieved Images using Intensity
Scale Measurement
Content Based Image Retrieval by Comparing Color and Shape Features
643
The edge detection operator (Sobel for example)
returns a value for the first derivative in the
horizontal direction (Gy) and the vertical direction
(Gx). From the edge gradient and direction can be
determined:
2 2
x y
G G G +
arctan .
y
x
G
G
_


,
6. CONCLUSION
Content-based image retrieval is currently a very
important and active research in the field of multimedia
databases. Since the explosive growth of image data in
the large image archives need a more prcised retrieval
techniques to find the similar images. In this paper the
intensity scale measurement is used for color histogram
to retrieve the similar images from the database. The
canny and sobel edge detection techniques are used to
detect the edges from the image database. From which
the canny edge detection techniques performance is
better than the sobel edge detection technique. Canny
gives good result in retrieving the edges.
7. SCOPE AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper, the query image from the large image
database are retrieved by using two features that are
color and shape. In shape, there are used two edge
detection techniques that are canny and sobel. And in
color feature there is used intensity scale measurement.
In this the comparative study is done. In future work, if
there will be used shape and color techniques
combinedly then the result will be retrieved as per query.
REFERENCES
[1] A. Smeulder, M. Worring, S. Santini, A. Gupta and
R. Jain, Content Based Image Retrieval at the End of
the Early Years, IEEEPAMI, 2000.
[2] Canny, J., A Computational Approach to Edge
Detection, IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence, 1986.
[3] Lim, J.H., S.J. Jesse and Luo Suhuai, A Structured
Learning Approach to Semantic Photo Indexing and
Query, Asia Information Retrieval Symposium, Jeju Island,
Korea, October 2005.
[4] Swain, M.J. and D.H. Ballard, Color Indexing,
International Journal of Computer Vision, 1991.
[5] Y. Rui, T. S. Huang and S. F. Chang, Image Retrieval:
Current Techniques, Promising Directions and Open
Issues, Journal of Visual Communication and Image
Representation, 1999.
Table 1
Retrieved Images Threshold Values
Object Threshold
category value Object 1 Object 2 Object 3 Object 4 Object 5 Object 6 Object 7 Object 8 Object 9 Object 10
Img.1 0.4 0.00 0.35 0.41 0.50 0.53 0.55 0.55 0.58 0.60 0.64
Img.2 0.4 0.00 0.66 1.66 2.51 3.60 4.29 4.54 5.34 6.78 6.94
Img.3 0.4 0.00 0.74 0.87 0.96 1.04 1.08 1.12 1.12 1.15 1.16
Img.4 0.4 0.00 0.30 0.38 0.40 0.45 0.46 0.58 0.59 0.61 0.68
Img.5 0.4 0.00 1.04 1.28 1.31 1.37 1.57 1.68 1.74 1.77 1.79