A geometric data structure applicable to image mining and retrieval

Abstract

Due to improvements in image acquisition and storage technology, terabyte-sized databases of images are nowadays common. This abundance of data leads us to two basic problems: how to exploit images (image mining)? Or how to make it accessible to human beings (image retrieval)? The specificity of image mining/retrieval among other similar topics (object recognition, machine vision, computer vision, etc.) is precisely that their techniques operate on the whole collection of images, not a single one. Under these circumstances, it is obvious that the time complexity of related algorithms plays an important role. In this paper, we suggest a novel general approach applicable to image mining and retrieval, using only compact geometric structures which can be pre-computed from a database. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.