The MPEG-7 color layout descriptor: a compact image feature description for high-speed image/video segment retrieval

This paper proposes a color feature description for image and video retrieving applications such as personal video recorder, which manages a large amount of data. This descriptor specifies the spatial distribution of colors with a few nonlinear quantized DCT coefficients of grid based average colors. The tradeoff between the number of the coefficients enclosed in the descriptor and retrieval cost is studied. The experimental results show that the descriptor enclosing six for luminance and three for each chrominance coefficient achieves the best trade-off between the storage cost and retrieval efficiency. It requires 6 bits for DC and 5 bits for AC coefficients, and therefore total storage cost is just 63 bits per image. This description, named color layout descriptor, has been accepted as a part of the MPEG-7 final committee draft.