Mohammad Rezaei - Department of computer engineering, K.N.Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
Ali Ahmadi - Department of computer engineering, K.N.Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
Navid Naderi - Department of computer engineering, K.N.Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

This paper presents a new method to extract image low-level features, namely mix histogram (MH), for content-based image retrieval. Since color and edge orientation features are important visual information which help the human visual system percept and discriminate different images, this method extracts and integrates color and edge orientation information in order to measure similarity between different images. Traditional color histograms merely focus on the global distribution of color in the image and therefore fail to extract other visual features. The MH is attempting to overcome this problem by extracting edge orientations as well as color feature. The unique characteristic of the MH is that it takes into consideration both color and edge orientation information in an effective manner. Experimental results show that it outperforms many existing methods which were originally developed for image retrieval purposes.

image retrieval, color, edge orientation, CBIR