Dictionary-based color image retrieval using multiset theory

• We introduce a new approach for color image retrieval based on data compression.
• The visual patterns of an image are represented as a multiset.
• We introduce the NMD as a new dictionary centered dissimilarity metric.
• The proposed technique was tested successfully in the color image retrieval tasks.

Dictionaries have recently attracted a great deal of interest as a new powerful representation scheme that can describe the visual content of an image. Most existing approaches nevertheless, neglect dictionary statistics. In this work, we explore the linguistic and statistical properties of dictionaries in an image retrieval task, representing the dictionary as a multiset. This is extracted by means of the LZW data compressor which encodes the visual patterns of an image. For this reason the image is first quantized and then transformed into a 1D string of characters. Based on the multiset notion we also introduce the Normalized Multiset Distance (NMD), as a new dictionary-based dissimilarity measure which enables the user to retrieve images with similar content to a given query. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in retrieval performance compared to related dictionary-based techniques or to several other image indexing methods that utilize classical low-level image features.