Search web images using objects, backgrounds and conditions

As the volumes of web images have grown rapidly in the last decade, Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has attracted substantial interests as an effective tool to manage the images. Most existing CBIR systems focus on the object in the image, while ignoring the conditions (day/night, sunny/rain, etc) and the backgrounds, both of which are very helpful to meet the user's information need. To overcome this shortcoming, in this paper, we present a novel CBIR system depending on a novel query formulation considering three aspects: Object, Background and Condition. Specifically, we design a user-friendly interface to help the user formulate a query. The interface can allow the user to give the percentage, relative position and size of each object in the background. Moreover, a corresponding effective ranking method is proposed to return the desirable search results. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed system improves the searching performance and the user experience compared with the existing searching systems.