Querying web images by topic and example specification methods

Abstract

Ever since the advent of Internet, there has been an immense growth in the amount of image data that is available on the World Wide Web. With such a magnitude of image availability, an efficient and effective image retrieval system is required to make use of this information. This research presents an image matching and indexing technique that improvises on existing integrated image retrieval methods. The proposed system integrates query by topic and query by example specification methods. The topic-based image retrieval uses the structured format of HTML documents to retrieve relevant pages and potential match images. The query by example specification performs content-based image match for the retrieval of smaller and relatively closer results of the example image. The main goal is to develop a functional image search and indexing system without using a database and to demonstrate that better retrieval results can be achieved with this proposed hybrid search technique. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.