About the embedding of color uncertainty in CBIR systems

This paper focuses on the embedding of the uncertainty about color images, naturally arising from the quantization and the human perception of colors, into histogram-type descriptors, adopted as indexing mechanism. In particular, our work has led to an extension of the GIFT platform for Content Based Image Retrieval based on fuzzy color indexing in the HSV color space. To quantify the performances of this basic system, we have investigated different indexing strategies, based on classical logics and fuzzy logics. Performance improvements are shown, in terms of effectiveness, perfect/good searches, number and position of relevant images returned, especially in the case of large databases containing images with noisy interferences.