Affiliations: [a] School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, P.R. China | [b] State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, P.R. China | [c] Gippsland School of IT, Monash University, Churchill, VIC, Australia
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Dr. J. Hou, School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan 610031, P.R. China. E-mail: [email protected].
Abstract: There has been a growing interest in implementing image search engine at the semantic level. However, most existing practical systems including popular commercial image search engines like Google and Yahoo! are either text-based or a simple hybrid of texts and visual features. This paper proposes a novel image search system based on automatic image annotation. We develop a technology which learns semantic image concepts from image contents and transforms unstructured images into textual documents, so that images are indexed and retrieved in the same way as textual documents. Existing database management systems can be used to effectively manage image contents, and image search can be as efficient as text search by transforming images into textual documents through machine learning. Experiments in both the Corel dataset and real Web dataset are performed to validate our system and the results are promising. This system suggests a new combination of texts and visual features in order to achieve a semantic image search, and is expected to become a re-ranking system to the existing image search result via the Internet.
