Drug Image Retrieval by Shape and Color Similarity of the Medication

This paper presents a novel approach for contents-based medication image retrieval from a drug image database based on the shape and color information of the drug pill images. The shape information of the drug image represented as a signature and HSV color model from the images are used to distinguish a medication from a set of medication images. To retrieve an image from a large image database, we set up a hybrid approach which classifies the medications by shape of the images first and identifies them by color matching from the classified images. As a shape descriptor we use the signature of the medication which is unique according to the boundary of the medication. HS color components are used for retrieving a finally-matched image from a candidate shape class. The proposed system is designed and developed for seniors and people who don´t have knowledge about medication to help browsing medication image in a feasible fashion.