Retrieval of identical clothing images based on local color histograms

In this paper, we present a novel approach to retrieve the person images that contain the identical clothing to a query image from the image set captured by multiple CCTV cameras. In order to measure the similarity of the clothing, we analyze the color information of the clothing area in the image. To find the clothing area, we detect the face area first. The clothing area is found based on the position of the face area. Then, we apply the color quantization to the clothing area. We build six color histograms based on the quantized color for six sub-regions defined in the clothing area. The feature vector for the clothing area is composed by using the color histograms. Similarity between two clothing areas is measured by Euclidean distance between the feature vectors. In the experimental results, our approach shows the better performance compared with the method that uses HSV histogram-based color analysis.