Scalable Image Indexing and Retrieval using Wavelets

With the development of world wide web and fast computer technology, the use of visual information has become a routine in scientific and commercial applications. Images and videos are being captured and archived in large databases and it is extremely important to develop efficient technologies to process, manipulate, and search large visual information archives. In this context, retrieving images by content has gained increasing interest. The existing image indexing systems deliver poor performance for large image archives. In this paper, we present an efficient content based indexing and retrieval mechanism based on energy properties of wavelet coefficients. The system is scalable and provides fast retrievals. We show that in a database of 1000 images, query search takes less than 50 msec, compared to several seconds of retrieval time in the earlier systems. Given a query image, the ratio of the similar images over the number of images retrieved for a maximum quality search is ß 0:9..