Content-based image indexing and retrieval: A syntactical approach

Abstract

This paper presents a syntactical approach to the content-based indexing and retrieval of images. Studies on the content-based indexing/retrieval of images were motivated to derive from the visual features inside images a set of objective criteria for the indexing/retrieval of the images. The existing content-based image indexing and retrieval methods, however, use in an unstructured manner the visual features such as edge elements, color histogram, texture distribution, and so on. As a result, both indexing and retrieval are not efficient and effective, compared with the text-based methods. A new hierarchical structure representation is presented in this paper. Since the hierarchical structure is generated with a data-driven approach, an objective description on an image can be obtained. The potential application of the hierarchical structure to the content-based image indexing and retrieval is discussed.