• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
• /
• v.34 no.1
• /
• pp.1-10
• /
• 2007

This paper proposes a new indexing mechanism for MPEG-7 visual descriptors, especially Dominant Color and Contour Shape descriptors, that guarantees an efficient similarity search for the multimedia database whose visual meta-data are represented with MPEG-7. Since the similarity metric used in the Dominant Color descriptor is based on Gaussian mixture model, the descriptor itself could be transform into a color histogram in which the distribution of the color values follows the Gauss distribution. Then, the transformed Dominant Color descriptor (i.e., the color histogram) is indexed in the proposed indexing mechanism. For the indexing of Contour Shape descriptor, we have used a two-pass algorithm. That is, in the first pass, since the similarity of two shapes could be roughly measured with the global parameters such as eccentricity and circularity used in Contour shape descriptor, the dissimilar image objects could be excluded with these global parameters first. Then, the similarities between the query and remaining image objects are measured with the peak parameters of Contour Shape descriptor. This two-pass approach helps to reduce the computational resources to measure the similarity of image objects using Contour Shape descriptor. This paper also proposes two integration schemes of visual descriptors for an efficient retrieval of multimedia database. The one is to use the weight of descriptor as a yardstick to determine the number of selected similar image objects with respect to that descriptor, and the other is to use the weight as the degree of importance of the descriptor in the global similarity measurement. Experimental results show that the proposed indexing and integration schemes produce a remarkable speed-up comparing to the exact similarity search, although there are some losses in the accuracy because of the approximated computation in indexing. The proposed schemes could be used to build a multimedia database represented in MPEG-7 that guarantees an efficient retrieval.