Region based indexing in the JPEG2000 framework

The increased amount of visual data in several applications necessitates sophisticated indexing techniques for retrieval based on the image content. The recent JPEG2000 standard addresses the need for content based coding and manipulation of visual media. Future multimedia databases are expected to store images in the JPEG2000 format. Hence, it is crucial to develop indexing and retrieval systems that operate in the framework. Several content based indexing techniques have been proposed in the wavelet domain which is the technique of choice in the JPEG2000 standard. However, most of these techniques rely on extracting low level features such as color, texture and shape that represent the global image content. In this paper, we propose a region based indexing technique in the JPEG2000 framework. Specific regions of interest (ROI) (which insure the reconstructed quality in the image) are tracked and analyzed through different layers of the wavelet transform in the coding process. Shape features are extracted from the ROI sketch in the uncompressed domain. Texture and color features are extracted in the compressed domain at different wavelet resolutions corresponding to these regions. Indexing and retrieval are based on a combination of these features. Extensive simulations have been performed in the JPEG2000 framework. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to the exiting wavelet based indexing approaches the proposed scheme has superior performance.