Building a user-centered semantic hierarchy in image databases

Abstract

Recent development in the field of digital media technology has resulted in the generation of a huge number of images. Consequently, content-based image retrieval has emerged as an important area in multimedia computing. Research in human perception of image content suggests that the semantic cues play an important role in image retrieval. In this paper, we present a new paradigm to establish the semantics in image databases based on multi-user relevance feedback. Relevance feedback mechanism is one way to incorporate the users' perception during image retrieval. By treating each feedback as a weak classifier and combining them together, we are able to capture the categories in the users' mind and build a user-centered semantic hierarchy in the database to support semantic browsing and searching. We present an image retrieval system based on a city-landscape image database comprising of 3,009 images. We also compare our approach with other typical methods to organize an image database. Superior results have been achieved by the proposed framework. © Springer-Verlag 2007.