Content based image retrieval using curvelet transform

Feature extraction is a key issue in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). In the past, a number of texture features have been proposed in literature, including statistic methods and spectral methods. However, most of them are not able to accurately capture the edge information which is the most important texture feature in an image. Recent researches on multi-scale analysis, especially the curvelet research, provide good opportunity to extract more accurate texture feature for image retrieval. Curvelet was originally proposed for image denoising and has shown promising performance. In this paper, a new image feature based on curvelet transform has been proposed. We apply discrete curvelet transform on texture images and compute the low order statistics from the transformed images. Images are then represented using the extracted texture features. Retrieval results show, it significantly outperforms the widely used Gabor texture feature.