Early image retrieval techniques were based on textual annotation of images. Annotating images manually is a cumbersome and expensive task for large image databases, and is often subjective, context-sensitive and incomplete. Content based image retrieval, uses the visual contents of an image such as color, shape, texture, and spatial layout to represent and index the image. The Region Based Image Retrieval (RBIR) system uses the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and a k-means clustering algorithm to segment an image into regions. Each region is represented by means of a set of features and the similarity between regions is measured using a specific metric function on such features.

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Content based image retrieval K-Means Algorithm Discrete Wavelet Transform Region Based Image Retrieval