Improving the Performance of CBIR on Islamic Women Apparels Using Normalized PHOG

The designs of Islamic women apparels is dynamically changing, which can be shown by emerging of online shops selling clothing with fast updates of newest models. Traditionally, buying the clothes online can be done by querying the keywords to the retrieval system. The approach has a drawback that the keywords cannot describe the clothes designs precisely. Therefore, a searching based on content–known as content-based image retrieval (CBIR)–is required. One of the features used in CBIR is the shape. This article presents a new normalization approach to the Pyramid Histogram of Oriented Gradients (PHOG) as a mean for shape feature extraction of women Islamic clothing in a retrieval system. We refer to the proposed approach as normalized PHOG (NPHOG). The Euclidean distance measured the similarity of the clothing. The performance of the system was evaluated by using 340 clothing images, comprised of four clothing categories, 85 images for each category: blouse-pants, long dress, outerwear, and tunic. The recall and precision parameters measured the retrieval performance; the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and PHOG were the methods for comparison. The experiments showed that NPHOG improved the HOG and PHOG performance in three clothing categories.