Combining SURF and MSER along with Color Features for Image Retrieval System Based on Bag of Visual Words

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has received an extensive attention from researchers due to the rapid growing and widespread of image databases. Despite the massive research efforts consumed for CBIR, the completely satisfactory results have not yet been attained. In this article, we offer a new CBIR technique that relies on extracting Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) and Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) feature descriptors as well as the color features; color correlograms and Improved Color Coherence Vector (ICCV). These features are joined and used to build a multidimensional feature vector. Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) technique is utilized to quantize the extracted feature vector. Then, a multiclass Support Vector Machine (SVM) is implemented to classify the query images. The performance of the presented retrieval framework is analyzed and scrutinized by comparing it with three alternative approaches. The first one is based on extracting SURF descriptors while the second one is based on extracting SURF descriptors, color correlograms and ICCV. The third approach, on the other hand, is based on extracting MSER, color correlograms and ICCV. All implemented schemes are tested on two benchmark datasets; Corel-1000 and COIL-100 datasets. The empirical results show that our suggested approach has a superior discriminative classification and retrieval performance with respect to other approaches. The proposed method achieves average precisions of 88 and 93% for the Corel-1000 and COIL-100 datasets, respectively. Moreover, the proposed system has shown a substantial advance in the retrieval precision when compared with other existing systems.