Coarse-to-fine textures retrieval in the JPEG 2000 compressed domain for fast browsing of large image databases

In many applications, the amount and resolution of digital images have significantly increased over the past few years. For this reason, there is a growing interest for techniques allowing to efficiently browse and seek information inside such huge data spaces. JPEG 2000, the latest compression standard from the JPEG committee, has several interesting features to handle very large images. In this paper, these fea- tures are used in a coarse-to-fine approach to retrieve specific information in a JPEG 2000 code-stream while minimizing the computational load required by such processing. Practically, a cascade of classifiers exploits the bit-depth and resolution scalability features intrinsically present in JPEG 2000 to progressively refine the classification process. Comparison with existing techniques is made in a texture-retrieval task and shows the efficiency of such approach.