Yi Lu Murphey, and
Hong Guo
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The University of Michigan-Dearborn
Abstract
This paper presents our research in image content
based indexing and retrieval, a key technology in digital image library.
In most of the existing image content-based techniques, image features
used for indexing and retrieval are global, features are computed over
the entire image. The major problem with the global image feature based
retrieval methods is that background features can be easily mistakenly
taken as object features. When a user attempts to retrieve images using
color features, he/she usually means the color feature of an object or
objects contained in the image. The approach we describe in this paper
utilizes color clusters for image background analysis. Once the background
regions are identified, they are removed from the image indexing procedure;
therefore, no longer interfering with the meaningful image content during
the retrieval process. The algorithm consists of three major steps of computation,
fuzzy clustering, color image segmentation, and background analysis.