We are currently developing VisualSEEk: a content-based image/video retrieval system for the World Wide Web. VisualSEEk supports query by color and texture and spatial-layout. Other features such as shape, motion and embedded text will be incorporated in the near future. The system (see Figure 2) provides the user with a highly functional and platform independent Java user-interface which collects the user's query. The query is communicated to the VisualSEEk server on the World Wide Web through the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). The server answers the user's query by accessing the extracted meta-data that describes the images and videos in the archive.
Figure 2: VisualSEEk external system operation.
The VisualSEEk system emphasizes several research goals - automated extraction of localized regions and features, efficient representation of features, preservation of spatial properties, extraction from compressed data [Cha95][CS95] and fast indexing and retrieval. The color indexing component of the system uses the binary color set back-projection algorithm to extract color regions. The user may search for images using both global and local features. For a local color region query the user indicates the locations of the color regions by positioning regions on the query grid (see Figure 3(a)). The returned images can be used for a global query whereby the user selects one image and uses the give me more feature of VisualSEEk to retrieve images that best match the selected one in a specified way (see Figure 3(b)).
Figure 3: (a) VisualSEEk Java user interface and (b) query returns with give me more feature of VisualSEEk.