Analysis of distance metrics in content-based image retrieval using statistical quantized histogram texture features in the DCT domain

The effective content-based image retrieval (CBIR) needs efficient extraction of low level features like color, texture and shapes for indexing and fast query image matching with indexed images for the retrieval of similar images. Features are extracted from images in pixel and compressed domains. However, now most of the existing images are in compressed formats like JPEG using DCT (discrete cosine transformation). In this paper we study the issues of efficient extraction of features and the effective matching of images in the compressed domain. In our method the quantized histogram statistical texture features are extracted from the DCT blocks of the image using the significant energy of the DC and the first three AC coefficients of the blocks. For the effective matching of the image with images, various distance metrics are used to measure similarities using texture features. The analysis of the effective CBIR is performed on the basis of various distance metrics in different number of quantization bins. The proposed method is tested by using Corel image database and the experimental results show that our method has robust image retrieval for various distance metrics with different histogram quantization in a compressed domain.