MPEG-7 dominant color descriptor using merged palette histogram similarity measure

The MPEG-7 dominant color descriptor (DCD) is an effective and compact representation of salient colors in an image region, which is very useful for content-based image retrieval applications. However, the DCD's modified quadratic histogram distance measure (QHDM) has shortcomings in fitting human perception similarity matching. A new merged palette histogram similarity measure is proposed to provide an alternative for the QHDM. The new similarity measure is based on a merged color palette as a common color space to define histogram intersection. Experimental results show that this new similarity measure provides more accurate and perceptually relevant image retrieval.