Development of content-based trademark retrieval system on the World Wide Web

In this paper, we describe a new trademark retrieval system based upon the content or the shape of trademark. The system has an on-line graphical user interface for the World Wide Web (WWW) that allows user to provide a query in forms of a sketch or a visual image to search for similar trademarks from database. User interfaces for the WWW were implemented by utilizing HTML and lava applets. The query can occur in arbitrary size and orientation. A shape representation scheme invariant to scale and rotation was developed to measure the similarity between two trademarks using the magnitude of Zernike moments as a feature set. Performance evaluation has been carried out with a database of 3,000 trademarks. It takes only about 0.6 second for the retrieval on a 200 MHz Pentium PC. The average recall of the original one among top 30 candidates queried by noisy or deformed images was 100%.