Does Compression Affect Image Retrieval Performance?

摘要

Image retrieval and image compression are both fields of intensive research. As lossy image compression degrades the visual quality of images and hence changes the actual pixel values of an image, low level image retrieval descriptors which are based on statistical properties of pixel values will change, too. In this article we investigate how image compression affects the performance of low-level colour descriptors. Several image retrieval algorithms are evaluated on a speciated image database compressed at different image quality levels. Extensive experiments reveal that while distribution-based colour descriptors are fairly stable with respect to image compression a drop in retrieval performance can nevertheless be observed for JPEG compressed images. On the other hand, after application of JPEG2000 compression only a negligible performance drop is observed even at high compression ratios.