An Effective and Efficient Exact Match Retrieval Scheme for Symbolic Image Database Systems Based on Spatial Reasoning: A Logarithmic Search Time Approach

In this paper, a novel method of representing symbolic images in a symbolic image database (SID) invariant to image transformations that is useful for exact match retrieval is presented. The relative spatial relationships existing among the components present in an image are perceived with respect to the direction of reference and preserved by a set of triples. A distinct and unique key is computed for each distinct triple. The mean and standard deviation of the set of keys computed for a symbolic image are stored along with the total number of keys as the representatives of the corresponding image. The proposed exact match retrieval scheme is based on a modified binary search technique and, thus, requires O (logn) search time in the worst case, where n is the total number of symbolic images in the SID. An extensive experimentation on a large database of 22,630 symbolic images is conducted to corroborate the superiority of the model. The effectiveness of the proposed representation scheme is tested with standard testbed images