Color texture description with novel local binary patterns for effective image retrieval

We propose a novel local color texture descriptor called local binary pattern for color images (LBPC). The proposed descriptor uses a plane to threshold color pixels in the neighborhood of a local window into two categories. To boost the discriminative power of the proposed LBPC operator, local binary patterns of the hue component in the HSI color space, called the local binary pattern of the hue (LBPH) is derived. Further, LBPC, LBPH are fused to derive LBPC+LBPH which when combined with the color histogram (CH) of the hue component results in an effective image retrieval method LBPC+LBPH+CH. The uniform patterns of the two proposed descriptors ULBPC and ULBPH are combined to yield another low dimension local color descriptor ULBPC+ULBPH+CH which provides a good tradeoff between retrieval accuracy and speed. Detailed experiments conducted on Wang, Holidays, Corel-5K and Corel-10K datasets demonstrate that the proposed low dimension descriptors LBPC+LBPH+CH, and ULBPC+ULBPH+CH outperform the state-of-the-art color texture descriptors in terms of retrieval accuracy and speed.