A Journey from basic Image Features to Lofty Human Intelligence in Content-based Image Retrieval: Motivation, Applications and Future Trends

Abstract

Due to a remarkable increase in the complexity of the multimedia content, there is a cumulative enhancement of digital images both online and offline. For the purpose of retrieving images from a vast storehouse of images, there is an urgent requirement of an effectual image retrieval system and the most effective system in this domain is denoted as content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system. CBIR system is generally based on the extraction of basic image attributes like texture, color, shape, spatial information, etc. from an image. But, there exists a semantic gap between the basic image features and high-level human perception and to reduce this gap various techniques can be used. This paper presents a detailed study about the various basic techniques with an emphasis on different intelligent techniques like, the usage of machine learning, deep learning, relevance feedback, etc., which can be used to achieve a high level semantic information in CBIR systems. In addition, a detailed outline regarding the framework of a basic CBIR system, various benchmark datasets, similarity measures, evaluation metrics have been also discussed. Finally, solution to some research issues and future trends have also been given in this paper.