Abstract: This paper presents a first approach to build colour and structural descriptors for information retrieval on a people database. Queries are formulated in terms of their appearance that allows to seek people wearing specific clothes of a given colour name or texture. Descriptors are automatically computed by following three essential steps. A colour naming labelling from pixel properties. A region seg- mentation step based on colour properties of pixels combined with edge information. And a high level step that models the region arrangements in order to build clothes structure. Results are tested on large set of images from real scenes taken at the entrance desk of a building.

Abstract: This work is a part of a surveillance system where content- based image retrieval is done in terms of people appearance. Given an image of a person, our work provides an automatic description of his clothing according to the colour, texture and structural composition of its garments. We present a two-stage process composed by image segmentation and a region-based interpretation. We segment an image by modelling it due to an attributed graph and applying a hybrid method that follows a split-and-merge strategy. We propose the interpretation of five cloth combinations that are modelled in a graph structure in terms of region features. The interpretation is viewed as a graph matching with an associated cost between the segmentation and the cloth models. Fi- nally, we have tested the process with a ground-truth of one hundred images.