Content-based image retrieval for fabric images: A survey

Abstract

In recent years, a great deal of research has been conducted in the area of fabric image retrieval, especially the identification and classification of visual features. One of the challenges associated with the domain of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is the semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level human perceptions. Generally, CBIR includes two main components, namely feature extraction and similarity measurement. Therefore, this research aims to determine the content-based image retrieval for fabric using feature extraction techniques grouped into traditional methods and convolutional neural networks (CNN). Traditional descriptors deal with low-level features, while CNN addresses the high-level, called semantic features. Traditional descriptors have the advantage of shorter computation time and reduced system requirements. Meanwhile, CNN descriptors, which handle high-level features tailored to human perceptions, deal with large amounts of data and require a great deal of computation time. In general, the features of a CNN's fully connected layers are used for matching query and database images. In several studies, the extracted features of the CNN's convolutional layer were used for image retrieval. At the end of the CNN layer, hash codes are added to reduce  search time.