Fractional Local Neighborhood Intensity Pattern for Image Retrieval using Genetic Algorithm

Abstract

In this paper, a new texture descriptor named “Fractional Local Neighborhood Intensity Pattern” (FLNIP) has been proposed for content-based image retrieval (CBIR). It is an extension of an earlier work involving adjacent neighbors (local neighborhood intensity pattern). However, instead of considering two separate patterns for representing sign and magnitude information, one single pattern is generated. FLNIP calculates the relative intensity difference between a particular pixel and the center pixel of a 3 × 3 window by considering the relationship with adjacent neighbors. In this work, the fractional change in the local neighborhood involving the adjacent neighbors has been calculated first with respect to one of the eight neighbors of the center pixel of a 3 × 3 window. Next, the fractional change has been calculated with respect to the center itself. The two values of fractional change are next compared to generate a binary bit pattern. The descriptor is applied on four images- one being the raw image and the other three being filtered gaussian images obtained by applying gaussian filters of different standard deviations on the raw image to signify the importance of exploring texture information at different resolutions in an image. The four sets of distances obtained between the query and the target image are then combined with a genetic algorithm based approach to improve the retrieval performance by minimizing the distance between similar class images. The performance of the method has been tested for image retrieval on four databases and the proposed method has shown a significant improvement over many other existing methods. © 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.