Using Neighborhood Distributions of Wavelet Coefficients for On-the-Fly, Multiscale-Based Image Retrieval

In this paper, we define a similarity measure to compare images in the context of (indexing and) retrieval. We use the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to compare sparse multiscale image descriptions in a wavelet domain. The KL divergence between wavelet coefficient distributions has already been used as a similarity measure between images. The novelty here is twofold. Firstly, we consider the dependencies between the coefficients by means of distributions of mixed intra/interscale neighborhoods. Secondly, to cope with the high-dimensionality of the resulting description space, we estimate the KL divergences in the k-th nearest neighbor framework, instead of using classical fixed size kernel methods. Query-by-example experiments are presented.