Indexing via Color Histograms

The color spectrum of multicolored objects provides a a robust, efficient cue for indexing into a large database of models. This paper shows color histograms to be stable object representations over change in view, and demonstrates they can differentiate among a large number of objects. It introduces a technique called Histogram Intersection for matching model and image histograms and a fast incremental version of Histogram Intersection that allows real-time indexing into a large database of stored models using standard vision hardware. Color can also be used to search for the location of an object. An algorithm called Histogram, Backprojection performs this task efficiently in crowded scenes.