A novel multi-feature fusion and sparse coding-based framework for image retrieval

In traditional image retrieval techniques, the query results are severely affected when the images of varying illumination and scale, as well as occlusion and corrosion. Seeking to solve this problem, this paper proposed a novel multi-feature fusion and sparse coding based framework for image retrieval. In the framework, firstly, inherent features of an image are extracted, and then dictionary learning method is utilized to construct them to be dictionary features. Finally, the proposed framework introduces sparse representation model to measure the similarity between two images. The merit is that a feature descriptor is coded as a sparse linear combination with respect to dictionary feature so as to achieve efficient feature representation and robust similarity measure. In order to check the validity of the framework, this paper conducted two groups of experiments on Corel-1000 image dataset and the Stirmark benchmark based database respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed framework is much more effective than the state-of-the-art methods not only in traditional image dataset but also in varying image dataset.