Abstract: Color is one of the important characteristic of image, which is widely used in image retrieval. In the conventional color histogram retrieval algorithm, the color's spatial location information is discarded, and the retrieval precision of the algorithm is also affected. Aiming at this problem, this paper presented a color image retrieval algorithm based on the maximum similarity submatrix. hhis algorithm uses the odd square matrix in image segmentation to capture the color spatial distribution pattern and get the color matrix,then,find the maximum similarity submatrix of the two color matrix to achieve the similarity calculation. The results show that the algorithm in this paper can accurately describe the image color characteristic, and similarity calculation is very effective. Compared with global histogram, it has better retrieval precision.

Key words: Image retrieval, Color histogram, Color space, Color matrix, Similar submatrix