Compressed-domain image retrieval based on colour visual patterns

Image retrieval and image compression have been typically pursued separately. Only little research has been done on a synthesis of the two by allowing image retrieval to be performed directly in the compressed domain of images without the need to uncompress them first. In this chapter the authors show that such compressed domain image retrieval can indeed be done and lead to effective and efficient retrieval performance. They introduce a novel compression algorithm - colour visual pattern image coding (CVPIC) - and present several retrieval algorithms that operate directly on compressed CVPIC data. Their experiments demonstrate that it is not only possible to realise such midstream content access, but also that the presented techniques outperform standard retrieval techniques such as colour histograms and colour correlograms.