Abstract
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The me of low-level feature descriptors is pervasive in content-based image retrieval tasks and the answer to the question of how well these features describe users ' intention is inconclusive. In this paper we devise experiments to gauge the degree of alignment between the description of target images by humans and that implicitly provided by low-level image feature descriptors. Data was collected on how humans perceive similarity in images. Using images judged by humans to be similar, as ground truth, the performance of some MPEG-7 visual feature descriptors were evaluated. It is found that various descriptors play different roles in different queries and their appropriate combination can improve the performance of retrieval tasks. This forms a basis for the development of adaptive weight assignment to features depending on the query and retrieval task. © 2007 Crown Copyright.