A novel image retrieval approach based on color features and anisotropic directional information is proposed for content based image retrieval systems (CBIR). The color feature is described by the color histogram (CH), which is translation and rotation invariant. However, the CH does not contain spatial information which is very important for the image retrieval. To overcome this shortcoming, the subband energy of the lifting directionlet transform (L-DT) is proposed to describe the directional information, in which L-DT is characterized by multi-direction and anisotropic basis functions compared with the wavelet transform. A global similarity measure is designed to implement the fusion of both color feature and anisotropic directionality for the retrieval process. The retrieval experiments using a set of COREL images demonstrate that the higher query precision and better visual effect can be achieved.
