The need for efficient content-based image retrieval has increased tremendously in many application areas such as biomedicine, military, commerce, education, and Web image classification and searching. We present a method where local and global features are extracted. As a global feature, we extract the colour histogram. As local features, we extract prominent regions from the image using a k-means variant and a labeling algorithm. For each region, colour and spatial locations are extracted. Because these algorithms are computationally intensive, a hardware implementation is presented that accelerates the processing of the images. The proposed design is well suited for implementation on an FPGA. The device can be used as an add-on to a Personal Computer (PC).
