High-level clothes description based on colour-texture and structural features

This work is a part of a surveillance system where content-based image retrieval is done in terms of people appearance. Given an image of a person, our work provides an automatic description of his clothing according to the colour, texture and structural composition of its garments. We present a two-stage process composed by image segmentation and a region-based interpretation. We segment an image by modelling it due to an attributed graph and applying a hybrid method that follows a split-and-merge strategy. We propose the interpretation of five cloth combinations that are modelled in a graph structure in terms of region features. The interpretation is viewed as a graph matching with an associated cost between the segmentation and the cloth models. Finally, we have tested the process with a ground-truth of one hundred images. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.