Vector-wavelet based scalable indexing and retrieval system for large color image archives

This paper presents an efficient content based indexing and retrieval mechanism based on vector wavelet coefficients of color images. We use highly decorrelated wavelet coefficient planes to acquire a search efficient feature space. The feature space is subsequently indexed using properties of the all the images in the database. Therefore the feature key of an image does not only correspond to the content of the image itself but also how much the image is different from the other images being stored in the database. The search time depends only on the number of images similar to the query image but not on the size of the entire database. The system is scalable and provides fast retrievals. We show that in a database of 1000 images, query search takes less than 50 msec, on a 266 MHz Pentium processor compared to several seconds of retrieval time in the earlier systems proposed in the literature.