Image retrieval method combining visual saliency and phrases

The invention discloses an image retrieval method combining visual saliency and phrases. The image retrieval method comprises the following steps that a search image is input and decoded into a YUV color space, and K-means clustering is conducted on pixels of the YUV color space, so that the image is divided into multiple superpixel units; likelihood computation is conducted on each superpixel unit of the divided image, and four obtained likelihoods are fused, and then the saliency map of the superpixel precision is obtained; bilateral Gaussian filtering is conducted, an image saliency map of the pixel precision is obtained; self-adaptive threshold segmentation is conducted on the image saliency map, and a binary image with a prominent target portion is obtained; a dictionary is established, vision words of an image salient region are extracted, and image description is generated; the image similarity between the search image and each image in a image base is calculated. By the adoption of the image retrieval method, the salient region in the image can be more accurately reflected, the visual saliency and the phases are well combined, and the retrieval effect is good.