Content-based image retrieval using local visual attention feature

•Propose a novel content-based image retrieval using local visual attention feature.•Extract the visually significant image points with fast and performant SURF detector, and salient point expansion.•Color feature is represented by weighed color histogram of visually significant image points.•Spatial information is captured by spatial distribution entropy of visually significant image points.

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been an active research topic in the last decade. As one of the promising approaches, salient point based image retrieval has attracted many researchers. However, the related work is usually very time consuming, and some salient points always may not represent the most interesting subset of points for image indexing. Based on fast and performant salient point detector, and the salient point expansion, a novel content-based image retrieval using local visual attention feature is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the salient image points are extracted by using the fast and performant SURF (Speeded-Up Robust Features) detector. Then, the visually significant image points around salient points can be obtained according to the salient point expansion. Finally, the local visual attention feature of visually significant image points, including the weighted color histogram and spatial distribution entropy, are extracted, and the similarity between color images is computed by using the local visual attention feature. Experimental results, including comparisons with the state-of-the-art retrieval systems, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.