Enhancing image search engines in visual information environments

Abstract

The recent diverse environments and applications for image searching (e.g. Web image search engines) provide an enormous resource of information beyond the image pixels which can be used to improve the image search process. We explore several directions of enhancements that integrate the visual information with other information related to the images in the analysis and query processes. We demonstrate that these methods improve image search functionalities over non-integrated content-based methods.