Robust histogram-based image retrieval

•Content-based image retrieval method designed for noisy query images.•We introduce moment-based invariant functions that are tolerant to noise.•Invariant features are both on grayscale and color histograms.•Image-retrieval based on invariants outperform other methods.

We present a histogram-based image retrieval method which is designed specifically for noisy query images. The images are retrieved according to histogram similarity. To reach high robustness to noise, the histograms are described by newly proposed features which are insensitive to a Gaussian additive noise in the original images. The advantage of the new method is proved theoretically and demonstrated experimentally on real data.