An image retrieval system is a computer system for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large database

Database

A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...

 of digital image

Digital image

A digital image is a numeric representation of a two-dimensional image. Depending on whether or not the image resolution is fixed, it may be of vector or raster type...

s. Most traditional and common methods of image retrieval utilize some method of adding metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

 such as caption

Caption

Caption may refer to:*Caption , a small press and independent comic convention held annually in Oxford, England*Closed captioning, used to provide the text of a show's audio portion to those who may have trouble hearing it...

ing, keyword

Keyword (Internet search)

An index term, subject term, subject heading, or descriptor, in information retrieval, is a term that captures the essence of the topic of a document. Index terms make up a controlled vocabulary for use in bibliographic records. They are an integral part of bibliographic control, which is the...

s, 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

Automatic image annotation

Automatic image annotation is the process by which a computer system automatically assigns metadata in the form of captioning or keywords to a digital image...

. Additionally, the increase in social web application

Web application

A web application is an application that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is coded in a browser-supported language and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.Web applications are...

s and the semantic web

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...

 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 1980s, by Banireddy Prasaad, Amar Gupta

Amar Gupta

Amar Gupta is the Thomas R. Brown Professor of Management and Technology in the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, and also holds professorships in computer science and Latin American studies at Arizona.-Biography:...

, Hoo-min Toong, and Stuart Madnick

Stuart Madnick

Stuart Madnick is a professor of information technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology school of engineering.-Education:Madnick has degrees in Electrical Engineering Stuart Madnick is a professor of information technology at the MIT Sloan School...

.

A 2008 survey article documented progresses after 2007.

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
  Content-based image retrieval
  Content-based image retrieval , also known as query by image content and content-based visual information retrieval is the application of computer vision techniques to the image retrieval problem, that is, the problem of searching for digital images in large databases....
  
   (CBIR) – the application of computer vision
  Computer vision
  Computer vision is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analysing, and understanding images and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g., in the forms of decisions...
  
   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.

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 workshops from 1998 to 2001.

See also

• Computer vision
  Computer vision
  Computer vision is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analysing, and understanding images and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g., in the forms of decisions...
  
  
• Content-based image retrieval
  Content-based image retrieval
  Content-based image retrieval , also known as query by image content and content-based visual information retrieval is the application of computer vision techniques to the image retrieval problem, that is, the problem of searching for digital images in large databases....
  
   (CBIR)
• Digital asset management
  Digital asset management
  Digital asset management consists of management tasks and decisions surrounding the ingestion, annotation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets...
  
  
• Digital image editing
• Image organizer
  Image organizer
  An image organizer or image management application is application software focused on organizing digital images. Image organizers represent one kind of desktop organizer software applications.- Common image organizers features :...
  
  
• Information retrieval
  Information retrieval
  Information retrieval is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web...
  
  
• Image processing
  Image processing
  In electrical engineering and computer science, image processing is any form of signal processing for which the input is an image, such as a photograph or video frame; the output of image processing may be either an image or, a set of characteristics or parameters related to the image...
  
  
• Multimedia Information Retrieval
  Multimedia Information Retrieval
  Multimedia Information Retrieval is a research discipline of computer science that aims at extracting semantic information from multimedia data sources. Data sources include directly perceivable media such as audio, image and video, indirectly perceivable sources such as text, biosignals as well...
  
  

External links

• http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/larryz/zitnickcfir03.pdf Content-Free Image Retrieval by C. Lawrence Zitnick and Takeo Kanade, May 2003
• PDF Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology Special Issue on Visual Search. June/July 2009. 35:5 ISSN: 1550-8366.
• alipr.com Automatic image tagging and visual image search. Developed with Stanford and Penn State technologies.
• CIRES Image retrieval system developed by the University of Texas at Austin.
• FIRE Image retrieval system developed by the RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany.
• GIFT GNU Image Finding Tool, originally developed at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
• ImageCLEF A benchmark to compare the performance of image retrieval systems.
• imgSeek Open-source desktop photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features.
• img(Anaktisi) This Web-Solution implements a new family of CBIR descriptors. These descriptors combine in one histogram color and texture information and are suitable for accurately retrieving images.
• Caliph & Emir: Creation and Retrieval of images based on MPEG-7 (GPL).
• img(Rummager): Image retrieval Engine (Freeware Application).
• Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder: Photo collection manager and viewer with content-based image search.
• Search by Drawing
• PicsLikeThat: Visual image search on Fotolia