In image retrieval, an effective dissimilarity measure is required to retrieve the perceptually similar images. Minkowski-type ( ) distance is widely used for image retrieval, however it has its limitations. It focuses on distance between image features and ignores the data distribution of the image features, which can play an important role in measuring perceptual similarity of images. also favours the most dominant components in calculating the total dissimilarity. A data dependent measure, named -dissimilarity, which estimates the dissimilarity using the data distribution, has been proposed recently. Rather than relying on geometric distance, it measures the dissimilarity between two instances in each dimension as a probability mass in a region that encloses the two instances. It considers two instances in a sparse region to be more similar than in a dense region. Using the probability of data mass enables all the dimensions of feature vectors to contribute in the final estimate of dissimilarity, so it does not just heavily bias towards the most dominant components. However, relying only on data distribution and completely ignoring the geometric distance raise another limitation. This can result in finding two instances similar only due to being in a sparse region, however if the geometric distance between them is large then they are not perceptually similar. To address this limitation we proposed a new hybrid data dependent dissimilarity (HDDD) measure that considers both data distribution as well as geometric distance. Our experimental results using Corel database and Caltech 101 show that (HDDD) leads to higher image retrieval performance than distance ( ) and .
Keywords-Image retrieval; Dissimilarity measure; Data dependent dissimilarity measure! -dissimilarity in image retrieval. To evaluate this method, we use two datasets, which are represented with two different