Applying Content-Based Image Retrieval Techniques to Provide New Services for Tourism Industry

The aim of this paper is to use the network and internet and also to apply the content based image retrieval techniques to provide new services for tourism industry. The assumption is a tourist faces an interesting subject; he or she can take an image of subject by a handheld device and send it to the server as query image of CBIR. In the server, images similar to the query are retrieved and results are returned to the handheld device to be shown on a web browser. Then, the tourist can access the useful information about the subject by clicking on one of the retrieved images. For this purpose, a tourism database is created. Then several particular content-based image retrieval techniques are selected and applied to the database. Among these techniques, 'Edge Histogram Descriptor (EHD)' and 'Color layout descriptor (CLD)' algorithms have better retrieval performances than the others. By combining and modification of these two methods, a new CBIR algorithm is proposed for this application. Simulation results show a high retrieval performance for the proposed algorithm.