Database Kernel for Image Retrieval

This article presents a software tool that implements a dedicated multimedia database management server for managing alphanumerical and multimedia data collections from medical domain. An element of originality for this database management system (DBMS) is that along with classical operations for databases, it includes a series of algorithms used for extracting visual information from images (texture and color characteristics). The color histogram with 166 colors in HSV space represents the image color information. A vector with 12 values represents the texture information obtained by applying Gabor filters. The extracted data are stored in the database in a special data type called IMAGE, with a specific structure that can be used for visual queries. To increase the image retrieval speed, there are used some clustering algorithms.