Similarity matching

Abstract

Image databases will force us to rethink many of the concepts that led us so far. One of these is matching. We argue that the fundamental operation in a content-indexed image database should not be matching the query against the images in the database in search of a “target” image that best matches the query. The basic operation in query-by-content will be ranking portions of the database with respect to similarity with the query. What kind of similarity measure should be used is a problem we begin exploring in this paper. We let psychological experiments guide us in the quest for a good similarity measure, and devise a measure derived from a set-theoretic measure proposed in the psychological literature, modified by the introduction of fuzzy logic. We report one experiment comparing this measure with other proposed in experimental psychology.