John R. Smith and Shih-Fu Chang
Department of Electrical Engineering and
Center for Image Technology for New Media
Columbia University,
New York, N.Y. 10027
{jrsmith, sfchang}@itnm.columbia.edu
We describe a visual information system prototype for searching for images and videos on the World-Wide Web. New visual information in the form of images, graphics, animations and videos is being published on the Web at an incredible rate. However, cataloging this visual data is beyond the capabilities of current text-based Web search engines. In this paper, we describe the complete system by which visual information on the Web is collected by automated agents and is catalogued and indexed for fast search and retrieval. We provide an initial evaluation based upon the cataloging of over one half million images and videos from the Web.
Keywords - content-based query, image and video storage and retrieval, image/video subject cataloging, search engines, World-Wide Web.