Specific object retrieval based on salient regions

In this paper, we present an image retrieval technique for specific objects based on salient regions. The salient regions we select are invariant to geometric and photometric variations. Those salient regions are detected based on low level features, and need to be classified into different types before they can be applied on further vision tasks. We first classify the selected regions into four types including blobs, edges and lines, textures, and texture boundaries, by using the correlations with the neigbouring regions. Then, some specific region types are chosen for further object retrieval applications. We observe that regions selected from images of the same object are more similar to each other than regions selected from images of different objects. Correlation is used as the similarity measure between regions selected from different images. Two images are considered to contain the same object, if some regions selected from the first image are highly correlated to some regions selected from the second image. Two data sets are employed for experiment: the first data set contains human face images of a number of different people and is used for testing the retrieval algorithm on distinguishing specific objects of the same category; and the second data set contains images of different objects and is used for testing the retrieval algorithm on distinguishing objects of different categories. The results show that our method is very effective on specific object retrieval. © 2006 Pattern Recognition Society.