The role of color in content-based image retrieval

Abstract

Human color perception is subjective. In addition to RGB or HSV values representing color content, psychological factors, circumstantial factors, environmental factors, and physiological factors play an important role in encapsulating the color content. Typically, only the RGB or HSV values are used in indexing and retrieval of color images. In this paper, we demonstrate the superior retrieval performance of techniques which employ all of the above factors in color retrieval. We first present the variety of factors involved in human color perception and also an evaluation of the existing color indexing methods. Several interesting problems including comparison of images in the color-perceptual domain and retrieval by color affection are illustrated as potential novel image query mechanisms.