Image Search Engine

Introduction

Due to improved digital imaging technologies and convenient accessibility facilitated by the Internet, the popularity of digital images is rapidly increasing. As most of those images are not annotated with semantic descriptors, it might be a challenge for general users to find specific images from the Internet.

Image search engines are such systems that are specially designed to help users find their intended images. In general, image search engines may adopt two approaches to achieve this goal. One is text-based; the other is content-based.

Text-based image search engines index images using the words associated with the images. Depending on whether the indexing is done automatically or manually, image search engines adopting this approach may be further classified into two categories: Web image search engine or collection-based search engine. Web image search engines collect images embedded in Web pages from other sites on the Internet, and index them using the text...