Improved SIM algorithm for effective image retrieval

Contents-based image retrieval methods are in general more objective and effective than text-based image retrieval algorithms since they use color and texture in search and avoid annotating all images for search. SIM (Self-organizing Image browsing Map) is one of contents-based image retrieval algorithms that uses only browsable mapping results obtained by SOM (Self Organizing Map). However, SOM may have an error in selecting the right BMU in learning phase if there are similar nodes with distorted color information due to the intensity of light or objects' movements in the image. Such images may be mapped into other grouping nodes thus the search rate could be decreased by this effect. In this paper, we propose an improved SIM that uses HSV color model in extracting image features with color quantization. In order to avoid unexpected learning error mentioned above, our SOM consists of two layers. In learning phase, SOM layer 1 has the color feature vectors as input. After learning SOM Layer 1, the connection weights of this layer become the input of SOM Layer 2 and re-learning occurs. With this multi-layered SOM learning, we can avoid mapping errors among similar nodes of different color information. In search, we put the query image vector into SOM layer 2 and select nodes of SOM layer 1 that connects with chosen BMU of SOM layer 2. In experiment, we verified that the proposed SIM was better than the original SIM and avoid mapping error effectively.