Indexing for complex queries on a query-by-content image database

We describe how the QBIC (Query By Image Content) system handles "multi-*" queries-queries on large image collections involving multifeatures of each image as a whole and of multiple objects within each image. The queries are based on properties of image content-such as colors, textures, shapes, and edges. The system computes a set of features to describe the above properties, uses distance-like measures on the features to provide similarity based retrieval, and has a graphical interface that enable users pose queries visually. In this paper, we present QBIC indexing algorithms that allow these "multi-*" queries to run efficiently.