1) The document describes an efficient region-based image retrieval system that uses discrete wavelet transform and k-means clustering. It segments images into regions, each characterized by features like size, mean, and covariance.
2) The system pre-processes images by resizing, converting to HSV color space, performing DWT, and using k-means clustering on DWT coefficients to generate regions. It extracts features for each region and stores them in a database.
3) For retrieval, it pre-processes the query image similarly and calculates similarities between the query regions and database regions based on their features, returning similar images.