Thesaurus-aided approach for image browsing and retrieval

Abstract

The current trend of image retrieval is to incorporate image semantics with visual features to enhance retrieval performance. Although many approaches annotate images with keywords and process query at the semantic level, they fail to explore the full potentials of semantics. This paper proposes thesaurus-aided approaches to facilitate semantics-based access to images. The contribution of our work are two-fold: constructing a dynamic semantic hierarchy (DSH) which supports flexible image browsing by semantic subjects, as well as formulating a semantic similarity metric to get incorporated with visual similarity to improve the accuracy of image retrieval Experiments conducted on the real-world images demonstrates the effectiveness of our approaches.