IMAGE INDEXING USING COLOR CORRELOGRAMS

A color correlogram is a three-dimensional table indexed by color and distance between pixels which expresses how the spatial correlation of color changes with distance in a stored image. The color correlogram may be used to distinguish an image from other images in a database. To create a color correlogram, the colors in the image are quantized into m color values, c.sub.i . . . c.sub.m. Also, the distance values k.epsilon.[d] to be used in the correlogram are determined where [d] is the set of distances between pixels in the image, and where dmax is the maximum distance measurement between pixels in the image. Each entry (i, j, k) in the table is the probability of finding a pixel of color c.sub.i at a selected distance k from a pixel of color c.sub.i. A color autocorrelogram, which is a restricted version of the color correlogram that considers color pairs of the form (i,i) only, may also be used to identify an image.