Spatial match representation scheme supporting ranking in iconic images databases

Because content-based image retrieval is essential to retrieve relevant multimedia documents, we represent images as a set of recognizable symbols, i.e., icon objects, and do indexing by regarding the icon object as a representative of a given document. When users request content-based image retrieval, we convert a query image into icon objects and retrieve relevant images in the database. In this paper, we propose a new spatial-match representation scheme, called SRR (Spatial-match Representation supporting Ranking) scheme, which combine directional operators with positional operators. Therefore, our SRR scheme can represent spatial relationships between icon objects precisely and can provide ranking for the retrieved images. In addition, we compare our scheme with the conventional 9DLT and SMR schemes in terms of retrieval effectiveness. Finally, we show from our experiment that our SRR scheme holds about 25% higher recall and about 10% higher precision, compared with the 9DLT and the SMR.