Reducing the Dimensions of Texture Features for Image Retrieval Using Multi-layer Neural Networks

: This paper presents neural network-based dimension reduction of texture features in content-based image retrieval. In particular, we highlight the usefulness of hetero-associative neural networks to this task, and also propose a scheme to combine the hetero-associative and auto-associative functions. A multichannel Gabor-filtering approach is used to derive 30-dimensional texture features from a set of homogeneous texture images. Multi-layer feedforward neural networks are then trained to reduce the number of feature dimensions. Our results show that the methods lead to a reduction of up to 30% while keeping or even improving the performance of similarity ranking. This has the benefit of alleviating the ill-effects of the high dimensionality of features in current image indexing methods and resulting in significant speeding up retrieval rates. Results using principal component analysis are also provided for comparison.