Copyright 2018 Society of Photo‑Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this publication for a fee or for commercial purposes, and modification of the contents of the publication are prohibited.This paper presents a novel content-based image search and retrieval (CBIR) system that achieves coarse to fine remote sensing (RS) image description and retrieval in JPEG 2000 compressed domain. The proposed system initially: i) decodes the code-streams associated to the coarse (i.e., the lowest) wavelet resolution, and ii) discards the most irrelevant images to the query image that are selected based on the similarities estimated among the coarse resolution features of the query image and those of the archive images. Then, the code-streams associated to the sub-sequent resolution of the remaining images in the archive are decoded and the most irrelevant images are selected by considering the features associated to both resolutions. This is achieved by estimating the similarities between the query image and remaining images by giving higher weights to the features associated to the finer resolution while assigning lower weights to those related to the coarse resolution. To this end, the pyramid match kernel similarity measure is exploited. These processes are iterated until the code-streams associated to the highest wavelet resolution are decoded only for a very small set of images. By this way, the proposed system exploits a multiresolution and hierarchical feature space and accomplish an adaptive RS CBIR with significantly reduced retrieval time. Experimental results obtained on an archive of aerial images confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system in terms of retrieval accuracy and time when compared to the standard CBIR systems
