Patent ID: 11880405
Assignee: INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 0:
1. A computer implemented method for searching for a similar image in an image database, the image database comprising partitions with images, comprising:
receiving, by a computer, a query image;
extracting, by the computer, one or more features of the query image, wherein extracting one or more features comprises performing pattern recognition to detecting a number of edges in the query image;
computing, by the computer, a value of a similarity measure of the query image, wherein the value of the similarity measure is based, at least in part, on the number of edges in the query image, and further classifying the query image based on one or more classification reference images;
comparing, by the computer, the value of the similarity measure of the query image with metadata of the partitions, the metadata comprising at least one respective global value of the similarity measure of each partition and a respective range of a number of edges of a respective partition, the respective global value being determined based on respective values of similarity measures assigned to the images of the respective partition;
discarding, by the computer, at least one partition of the image database based on the comparison of the value of the similarity measure of the query image to the respective range of the number of edges of the respective partition;
comparing, by the computer, the images of at least one of the remaining partitions with the query image; and
selecting, by the computer, at least one image of the at least one partition of the remaining partitions as the similar image based on the comparison of the images of the at least one of the remaining partitions with the query image.