Region filtering using color and texture features for image retrieval

This paper presents a region-based image retrieval (RBIR) system in which users can choose specific regions as the query. Our goal is to assist the user to formulate more precise queries with which the retrieval system can focus on the user's interested part. In this work, images are partitioned into a set of regions by using the watershed segmentation. Color-size histogram and Gabor texture features are extracted from each watershed region. We propose a scheme of region filtering based on individual features, rather than integrating different features, to reduce the computational load of the image retrieval. This paper also defines the dissimilarity measure of images, and therefore relevance feedback is used for improving our retrieval. Finally we describe some experimental results of our RBIR system.