Mathematical modeling of image database complexity

The performance of a content based image retrieval system strongly depends on its testbed. A theoretical framework is proposed for modeling image database complexity. The goal is to investigate the relationship between a given indexing technique and a given image database. As an analogy to the concept of perplexity of a text corpus, the complexity of an image database is introduced. This is a quantitative measure of the quality of an image database for the task of content access to the database. The complexity of an image database is an intrinsic property of the database and can be used to distinguish the difficulty of image retrieval on different databases. On the other hand, the measure can be used to compare the effectiveness of different indexing techniques