Shape-based image retrieval using k-means clustering and neural networks

Abstract

Shape is a fundamental image feature and belongs to one of the most important image features used in Content-Based Image Retrieval. This feature alone provides capability to recognize objects and retrieve similar images on the basis of their contents. In this paper, we propose a neural network-based shape retrieval system in which moment invariants and Zernike moments are used to form a feature vector. k-means clustering is used to group correlated and similar images in an image collection into k disjoint clusters whereas neural network is used as a retrieval engine to measure the overall similarity between the query and the candidate images. The neural network in our scheme serves as a classifier such that the moments are input to it and its output is one of the k clusters that has the largest similarity to the query image. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.