text: The typical content-based image retrieval problem is to find images within a database that are similar to a given query image. This paper presents a solution to a different problem, namely that of content based sub-image retrieval, i.e., finding images from a database that contains another image. Note that this is different from finding a region in a (segmented) image that is similar to another image region given as a query. We present a technique for CBsIR that explores relevance feedback, i.e., the user's input on intermediary results, in order to improve retrieval efficiency. Upon modeling images as a set of overlapping and recursive tiles, we use a tile re-weighting scheme that assigns penalties to each tile of the database images and updates the tile penalties for all relevant images retrieved at each iteration using both the relevant and irrelevant images identified by the user. Each tile is modeled by means of its color content using a compact but very efficient method which can, indirectly, capture some notion of texture as well, despite the fact that only color information is maintained. Performance evaluation on a largely heterogeneous dataset of over 10,000 images shows that the system can achieve a stable average recall value of 70 within the top 20 retrieved (and presented) images after only 5 iterations, with each such iteration taking about 2 seconds on an off-the-shelf desktop computer.
  @cite_0: This paper presents (Border Interior pixel Classification), a compact and efficient CBIR approach suitable for broad image domains. It has three main components: (1) a simple and powerful image analysis algorithm that classifies image pixels as either border or interior, (2) a new logarithmic distance (dLog) for comparing histograms, and (3) a compact representation for the visual features extracted from images. Experimental results show that the BIC approach is consistently more compact, more efficient and more effective than state-of-the-art CBIR approaches based on sophisticated image analysis algorithms and complex distance functions. It was also observed that the dLog distance function has two main advantages over vectorial distances (e.g., L 1 ): (1) it is able to increase substantially the effectiveness of (several) histogram-based CBIR approaches and, at the same time, (2) it reduces by 50 the space requirement to represent a histogram.
summary: The BIC approach was shown in @cite_0 to outperform several other CBIR approaches and, as such, we adopt it in our CBsIR proposal to extract and compare the visual feature of each tile with the goal of improving the retrieval accuracy.