Image retrieval based on color distribution entropy

Color histogram is an important technique for color image database indexing and retrieving. However, the main problem with color histogram indexing is that it does not take the color spatial distribution into consideration. Previous researches have proved that the effectiveness of image retrieval increases when spatial feature of colors is included in image retrieval. In this paper, two new descriptors, color distribution entropy (CDE) and improved CDE (I-CDE), which introduce entropy to describe the spatial information of colors, are presented. In comparison with the spatial chromatic histogram (SCH) and geostat which also measure the global spatial relationship of colors, the experiment results show that CDE and I-CDE give better performance than SCH and geostat. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.