Spiral Bit-string Representation of Color
for Image Retrieval

Abdelhamid Abdesselam1, Hui Hui Wang2, and Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer2
1Department of Computer Science, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman
2Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, UNIMAS, Malaysia

Abstract: This paper describes a color-based image retrieval technique that uses a new representation for the color content of an image. The new representation, called Spiral Bit-string Representation, is an extension of the traditional bitmap signature representation, where the image description is performed in a spiral manner, starting from the centre of the image and moving clockwise towards the border. The major advantages of this representation are its simplicity, its suitability for retrieval of rotated and scaled images as well as for sub-image querying.

Keywords: Color Image Retrieval, bit-string representation, rotation-invariant, scale-invariant.