A new palette histogram similarity measure for MPEG-7 dominant color descriptor

The MPEG-7 dominant color descriptor (DCD) is an effective, compact, and intuitive representation of salient colors in an image region and is very useful for content-based image retrieval and indexing applications. However, the original quadratic histogram distance measure (QHDM) for MPEG-7 DCD similarity matching does not fit the human perception very well. It may cause incorrect ranks between regions with similar salient color distributions. In this paper, a new merged palette histogram similarity measure is proposed to provide an alternative for the QHDM. The new similarity measure is based on a merged color palette as a common color space to define histogram intersection. Experimental results show that this new similarity measure provide better accurate and perceptually relevant image retrieval for MPEG-7 DCD.