Interval Type-2 Beta Fuzzy Near Sets Approach to Content-Based Image Retrieval

In computer-based search systems, similarity plays a key role in replicating the human search process which underlies many natural abilities, such as image recovery, language comprehension, decision-making, or pattern recognition. The search for images consists of establishing a correspondence between the available images and those sought by the user, by measuring the similarity between the images. In fact, image search per content is generally based on the similarity between the visual characteristics of the images. The distance function used to evaluate the similarity between images depends not only on the criteria of the search but also on the representation of the characteristics of the image. This is the main idea of a content-based image retrieval system. In this article, we first constructed type-2 beta fuzzy membership of descriptor vectors to help manage inaccuracy and uncertainty of the characteristics extracted from the feature of images. Subsequently, the retrieved images are ranked according to the novel similarity measure, which is noted type-2 fuzzy nearness measure (IT2FNM). By analogy to type-2 fuzzy logic, and motivated by a near sets theory, we advanced a new fuzzy similarity measure (FSM) noted as IT2FNM. Then, we propose three new IT2FSMs and provide mathematical justification to demonstrate that the proposed FSMs satisfy proximity properties (i.e., reflexivity, transitivity, symmetry, and overlapping). The experimental results generated using three image databases show consistent and significant results.