Image Retrieval of Songket Motifs Using Simple Shape Descriptors

Songket is a traditional handwoven cloth of the Malays and its beauty lies on the design of the songket motifs intricately woven on the cloth. Even though color is a feature of the motif, shape is more important in determining the type of the motifs. This paper describes and tests the efficiency of retrieving songket motifs images using different combination of five geometric shape descriptors. Even though there are many existing approaches of shape-based image retrievals, the goal of this paper is to take advantage of the faster calculations of the geometric shape descriptors to retrieve the images. Fifty selected songket motifs are used as sample queries in this paper. Similarities of these images are measured using Euclidean distance and performance of the retrieval effectiveness is evaluated using recall and precision rate. Results of the experiment showed that geometric shape descriptors are effective in retrieving the songket motifs