This paper presents a novel color feature descriptor, namely Color Mutual Information (CMI), to solve the problems of high computational complexity and low retrieval accuracy among the existing methods. The new color feature vector which describes the global and spatial distribution relation among different colors is obtained by calculating the average mutual information between one color and all the colors around it in the color correlation feature matrix, thus reducing the computational

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... xity. Inter-feature normalization has been applied in the combination of Color Mutual Information and Color Autocorrelogram (CA) to enhance the retrieval accuracy. The experimental result show that, in the circumstance with either invariable illumination or variable illumination, the newly integrated algorithm Color Autocorrelogram and Mutual Information (CAMI) performs better in terms of computational complexity, real-time response speed and retrieval accuracy.