Image Indexing and Retrieval

The advancement of information technology demands better communication and sharing of visual information globally. This is made possible due to the development of global computer network in the form of World Wide Web. Storage of visual information or image database has wide applications such as entertainment, film and video archives, finger print or face identification, geographical information systems, remote sensing, medicine, surveillance etc. Retrieval of visual information from a large image database is one of the most challenging tasks in content-based image retrieval (CBIR).The feature extraction plays an important role in CBIR whose effectiveness depends upon the method adopted for extracting features from given images. The visual content descriptors are either global or local. A global descriptor represents the visual features of the whole image, whereas a local descriptor represents the visual features of regions or objects to describe the image.