Logical Query Composition from Local Visual Feature Thesaurus

We present a novel framework for intelligent search and retrieval by image region composition. Unlike traditional Query-by-Example paradigm, no starting example image is used : the user provides its mental representation of target image by means of a region photometric thesaurus. It gives an overview of the database content in the query interface. Unsupervised generation of this thesaurus is based on grouping similar regions into “region categories”. The user can indicate the presence and absence of types of regions in searched images by a new logical composition of region categories query paradigm, which relates to that of text of retrieval. The sophisticated specification of the target image content introduces visual semantics in the search. The implementation of this framework is simple and fully unsupervised. Image symbolic indexing coupled with logical query allows very powerful and fast search. Two test scenarios are investigated : a photo-agency scenario on Corel Photostock and a TV news scenario.