RelaxImage: a cross-media meta-search engine for searching images from Web based on query relaxation

Abstract

We introduce a cross-media meta-search engine RelaxImage for searching images from Web. Notable features of the RelaxImage are as follows: (1) each user's keyword query is "relaxed", that is, by gradually relaxing the search terms used for image search, we can solve the problem of conventional image search engine such as Google. (2) For searching images, our RelaxImage sends a different keyword-query to each search engine of different media-type. We show several examples of how the relaxation approach works as well as ways that it can be applied. That is, our RelaxImage shows a great improvement for increasing recall ratio without decreasing of precision ratio.