Distance-based functions for image comparison

The interest in digital image comparison is steadily growing in the computer vision community. The definition of a suitable comparison measure for non-binary images is relevant in many image processing applications. Visual tasks like segmentation and classification require the evaluation of equivalence classes. Measures of similarity are also used to evaluate lossy compression algorithms and to define pictorial indices in image content based retrieval methods. In this paper we develop a distance-based approach to image similarity evaluation and we present several image distances which are based on low level features. The sensitivity and effectiveness are tested on real data. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.