Content-based retrieval of web pages and other hierarchical objects with self-organizing maps

Abstract

We propose a content-based information retrieval (CBIR) method that models known relationships between multimedia objects as a hierarchical tree-structure incorporating additional implicit semantic information. The objects are indexed based on their contents by mapping automatically extracted low-level features to a set of Self-Organized Maps (SOMs). The retrieval result is formed by estimating the relevance of each object by using the SOMs and relevance sharing in the hierarchical object structure. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach with a small-scale experiment by using our PicSOM CBIR system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.