Content-based high resolution remote sensing image retrieval with local binary patterns

Texture is a very important feature in image analysis including content-based image retrieval (CBIR). A common way of retrieving images is to calculate the similarity of features between a sample images and the other images in a database. This paper applies a novel texture analysis approach, local binary patterns (LBP) operator, to 1 m Ikonos images retrieval and presents an improved LBP histogram spatially enhanced LBP (SEL) histogram with spatial information by dividing the LBP labeled images into k*k regions. First different neighborhood P and scale factor R were chosen to scan over the whole images, so that their labeled LBP and local variance (VAR) images were calculated, from which we got the LBP, LBP/VAR, and VAR histograms and SEL histograms. The histograms were used as the features for CBIR and a non-parametric statistical test G-statistic was used for similarity measure. The result showed that LBPNAR based features got a very high retrieval rate with certain values of P and R, and SEL features that are more robust to illumination changes than LBP/VAR also obtained higher retrieval rate than LBP histograms. The comparison to Gabor filter confirmed the effectiveness of the presented approach in CBIR.