Title: A new method of combining colour, texture and shape features using the genetic algorithm for image retrieval

Authors: Mohamed Hamroun; Sonia Lajmi; Henri Nicolas; Ikram Amous

Addresses: LABRI Laboratory, Bordeaux University, France; MIRACL Laboratory, Sfax University, Tunisia ' MIRACL Laboratory, Sfax University, Tunisia ' LABRI Laboratory, Bordeaux University, France ' MIRACL Laboratory, Sfax University, Tunisia

Abstract: Semi-automatic or automatic image indexation emerged because manual image indexation is slow and tedious. Generally, this first indexation is used as part of a content-based image retrieval system (CBIR). To have a powerful CBIR system, it is necessary to be concerned with three main facets: 1) the choice of the descriptors (based on shape, colour and texture and/or a combination between them); 2) the process of indexation and finally; 3) the retrieval process. In this work, we focus mainly on an indexing based on genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm. We chose an optimal combination of colour, shape and texture (PCM: powerful combination method) descriptors. The fruit of our research work is implemented in a system called image search engine (ISE) which showed a very promising performance. In fact, the performance evaluation of the PCM method of our descriptors combination showed upgrades of the average precision metric from 66.6% to 89.30% for the 'food' category colour histogram, from 77.7% to 100% concerning CCV for the 'flower' category, and from 44.4% to 87.65% concerning the co-occurrence matrix for the 'building' category using the Corel dataset. Likewise, our ISE system showed much more interesting performance compared to what was shown in previous works.

Keywords: content-based image retrieval system; CBIR; genetic algorithm; particle swarm optimisation; PSO; image retrieval.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMIS.2019.104798

International Journal of Multimedia Intelligence and Security, 2019 Vol.3 No.3, pp.293 - 319

Received: 15 Feb 2019
Accepted: 06 Oct 2019

Published online: 31 Jan 2020 *

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