Abstract
Although numberless studies on image retrieval have been done, the achievements so far are still unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a new method that deploys the colour-pair information of an image. The colour-pair contains the colour information of neighbouring blocks of an image and it is used to determine the similarity between images. During the actual retrieval process, only these colour-pair files, which are relatively small in volume, are accessed. This thus gives us a much shorter retrieval time. The system is made further efficient with the introduction of hierachichal structure. Experiment results have shown that the overall performance of this approach is satisfactorily good.
