A fast compression-based similarity measure with applications to content-based image retrieval

Compression-based similarity measures are effectively employed in applications on diverse data types with a basically parameter-free approach. Nevertheless, there are problems in applying these techniques to medium-to-large datasets which have been seldom addressed. This paper proposes a similarity measure based on compression with dictionaries, the Fast Compression Distance (FCD), which reduces the complexity of these methods, without degradations in performance. On its basis a content-based color image retrieval system is defined, which can be compared to state-of-the-art methods based on invariant color features. Through the FCD a better understanding of compression-based techniques is achieved, by performing experiments on datasets which are larger than the ones analyzed so far in literature.

► Compression-based similarity measures are computationally intensive.
► We define a Fast Compression Distance for a content-based image retrieval system.
► FCD converts images into strings embedding texture information.
► A similarity is then computed between two strings.
► Experiments are carried out on datasets larger than the ones analyzed so far.