Multiresolution similarity search in image databases

Typically searching image collections is based on features of the images. In most cases the features are based on the color histogram of the images. Similarity search based on color histograms is very efficient, but the quality of the search results is often rather poor. One of the reasons is that histogram-based systems only support a specific form of global similarity using the whole histogram as one vector. But there is more information in a histogram than the distribution of colors. This paper has two contributions: (1) a new generalized similarity search method based on a wavelet transformation of the color histograms and (2) a new effectiveness measure for image similarity search. Our generalized similarity search method has been developed to allow the user to search for images with similarities on arbitrary detail levels of the color histogram. We show that our new approach is more general and more effective than previous approaches while retaining a competitive performance.