Region-Based Image Retrieval

Abstract

As the world becomes an increasingly networked place, effective access to information grows ever more important. This access can take several forms, including traditional database retrieval of structured information, retrieval in collections of documents, and search in collections of binary objects such as sounds, images, and videos. In the latter case, the key challenge is making sense of the objects: if we want to retrieve images of horses, how can we go about processing each image to assess the probability that it contains a horse? This is not a “toy” problem; real users such as graphic designers, editors looking for newspaper photos, students writing reports, and biologists looking for plant or animal specimens need to find images of particular objects.