A scalable integrated region-based image retrieval system

Abstract

We present a scalable algorithm for indexing and retrieving images based on region segmentation. The method uses statistical clustering on region features and IRM (integrated region matching), a measure developed to evaluate overall similarity between images. It incorporates properties of all the regions in the images by a region-matching scheme. The algorithm has been implemented as a part of our experimental SIMPLIcity (Semantics-sensitive Integrated Matching for Picture LIbraries) image retrieval system and tested on large-scale image databases of both general-purpose images and pathology slides. Experiments have demonstrated that this technique maintains the accuracy of the original system while reducing the matching time significantly.