Montage: An Image Database for the Fashion, Textile, and Clothing Industry in Hong Kong

The fashion, textile, and clothing industry is a main constituent in Hong Kong. In this industry, handling a large amount of images is an important task in various phases, for example, the designing, sourcing, and merchandising phase. We develop an image database system called, Montage for managing and retrieving these visual information e ciently and e ectively. Montage is an image database supporting content-based retrieval by color histogram, sketch, texture, and shape. One important feature of Montage is the Open Architecture design which makes the system extensible, customizible, and exible. There are two aspects of this open architecture design: (1) Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC) and (2) plug-in framework which we will discuss in more details. Moreover, we describe an experimental Java system enabling internet access to Montage. In the paper, we also present an experiment to evaluate the performance of several query methods.