This paper presents an approach to manage a large database using a compact color descriptor and a statistical method for accurately pruning the database. A compact color descriptor adopted in the proposed content-based image retrieval system is 63-bit binary Haar color histogram, which is very compact and can be effectively used for fast image search. In addition to fast searching using this compact descriptor, we further improve retrieval time by applying pruning technique, which looks for the candidate images similar to the query image from the database and ignore the rest that are not likely to the query image. The descriptors of the candidate images are then matched with that of the query. The most similar images will be retrieved and ordered according to their distance to the query. The proposed retrieval system can efficiently retrieve the most similar images from the database while can help reducing the retrieval time and the storage space.

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