JEmblazoner: Konstruktion von Wappenbildern aus textuellen Beschreibungen JEmblazoner: Construction of Coats of Arms Images from Textual Descriptions

This paper describes the free software component JEmblazoner. JEmblazoner is a Java-based user interface for Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) in databases of coats of arms images. JEmblazoner allows to create coats of arms images from textual descriptions (socalled Blazons) that can be used as input for CBIR queries. In CBIR image databases are queried by qualitative features without the assistance of human annotations. Such features can be color, color distributions, textures, shapes, etc. Usually, the user issues a query by selecting example images that look similar to those he wants to retrieve. Since in some situations suitable example images may not be available, we provide a textual interface from which search images may be generated. In this case JEmblazoner is – for the application domain of coats of arms – an extension to perform content-based retrieval from textual input. The paper describes the design and implementation of JEmblazoner as well as a number of rendered examples.