Because of the tremendous growth in digital imaging, enhanced communication and storage technology, billions of images are captured, stored, and exchanged daily. Finding and searching for an image in a large collection is becoming challenging. The query by reference image retrieval (IR) technique aims to close the semantic gap between the query and retrieve images while improving performance. The primary goal of the work proposed here is to develop discriminative and descriptive features of the image with the minimum possible size. Here, the weighted feature fusion-based IR technique is proposed using Sauvola local thresholding (SLT) and Thepade’s Sorted Block Truncation Coding (SBTC) methods. The proposed technique is tested using two standard datasets with mean square error (MSE) as a distance measure and average retrieval accuracy (ARA) as a performance metric. The technique has contributed to the enhancement of ARA with the small and fixed-size image feature vector. The feature vector generated is much smaller than the image dimension and is used as a feature vector to represent the image for retrieval. Results prove that the proposed technique of SBTC 8-ary with 0.1 weight and SLT with 0.9 weight feature fusion gives better ARA than other techniques studied.

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