A novel shape feature for image classification and retrieval

Abstract

In this paper a novel statistical shape feature called the edge co-occurrence matrix (ECM) is proposed for image classification and retrieval. The ECM indicates the joint probability of edge directions of two pixels at a certain displacement in an image. The ECM can be applied to various tasks since it does not require any segmentation information unlike most shape features. Comparisons are conducted between the ECM and several other feature descriptors with two defect image databases. Both the classification and retrieval performances are tested and discussed. The results show that the ECM is efficient and it provides noticeable improvement to the performance of our CBIR system. © Springer-Verlag 2004.