An image retrieval system is a computer system used for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases ...
of digital images. Most traditional and common methods of image retrieval utilize some method of adding
metadata
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
such as
captioning,
keywords, title or descriptions to the images so that retrieval can be performed over the annotation words. Manual image annotation is time-consuming, laborious and expensive; to address this, there has been a large amount of research done on automatic image annotation. Additionally, the increase in social
web application
A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection.
History
In earlier computing models like client-serv ...
s and the
semantic web have inspired the development of several web-based image annotation tools.
The first microcomputer-based image database retrieval system was developed at
MIT, in the 1990s, by Banireddy Prasaad,
Amar Gupta, Hoo-min Toong, and
Stuart Madnick
Stuart E. Madnick (born 1944) is an American computer scientist, and professor of information technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology school of engineering. He is the director of Cybersecurity ...
.
A 2008 survey article documented progresses after 2007.
All image retrieval systems as of 2021 were designed for 2D images, not 3D ones.
Search methods
Image search is a specialized data search used to find images. To search for images, a user may provide query terms such as keyword, image file/link, or click on some image, and the system will return images "similar" to the query. The similarity used for search criteria could be meta tags, color distribution in images, region/shape attributes, etc.
*
Image meta search - search of images based on associated metadata such as keywords, text, etc.
*
Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) – the application of
computer vision
Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the human ...
to the image retrieval. CBIR aims at avoiding the use of textual descriptions and instead retrieves images based on similarities in their contents (textures, colors, shapes etc.) to a user-supplied query image or user-specified image features.
**
List of CBIR Engines - list of engines which search for images based image visual content such as color, texture, shape/object, etc.
:
*
Image collection exploration - search of images based on the use of novel exploration paradigms.
Data scope
It is crucial to understand the scope and nature of image data in order to determine the complexity of image search system design. The design is also largely influenced by factors such as the diversity of user-base and expected user traffic for a search system. Along this dimension, search data can be classified into the following categories:
* ''Archives'' - usually contain large volumes of structured or semi-structured homogeneous data pertaining to specific topics.
* ''Domain-Specific Collection'' - this is a homogeneous collection providing access to controlled users with very specific objectives. Examples of such a collection are biomedical and satellite image databases.
* ''Enterprise Collection'' - a heterogeneous collection of images that is accessible to users within an organization’s intranet. Pictures may be stored in many different locations.
* ''Personal Collection'' - usually consists of a largely homogeneous collection and is generally small in size, accessible primarily to its owner, and usually stored on a local storage media.
* ''Web'' - World Wide Web images are accessible to everyone with an Internet connection. These image collections are semi-structured, non-homogeneous and massive in volume, and are usually stored in large disk arrays.
Evaluations
There are evaluation workshops for image retrieval systems aiming to investigate and improve the performance of such systems.
* ImageCLEF - a continuing track of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum that evaluates systems using both textual and pure-image retrieval methods.
* Content-based Access of Image and Video Libraries - a series of
IEEE
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operati ...
workshops from 1998 to 2001.
See also
*
Automatic image annotation
Automatic image annotation (also known as automatic image tagging or linguistic indexing) is the process by which a computer system automatically assigns metadata in the form of captioning or keywords to a digital image. This application of compu ...
*
Computer vision
Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the human ...
*
Concept-based image indexing
*
Content-based image retrieval (CBIR)
*
Digital asset management
*
Digital image editing
*
Image organizer
*
Image processing
An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensio ...
*
Information retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other c ...
*
Multimedia information retrieval
*
VisualRank
*
Learning to rank
References
External links
Image-Net.orgVGG Image Search Engine(VISE): a free and open source software for visual search of a large number of images using an image as a search query.
{{Search engines
Applications of computer vision