Useful and effective feature descriptors in content-based image retrieval of thermal images

Using content based image retrieval systems the images are compared on the grounds of the stored information of images. As simple descriptors the intensity (or color), the texture and the shape is widely used. Special property of thermal images - similarly to gray-scale images - the have only one intensity channel. But then these intensities change on an other way than in gray-scale images. In this paper the effectively usable intensity descriptors are examined, and the two dimensional Cartesian moments - as a descriptor - proved the best choice using thermal images. These feature descriptors can be compared by several distance and similarity measures, and some special weights are necessary in the case of thermal images.