An Ontology-Based Frameowrk for Semantic Image Analysis and Retrieval

Abstract

To overcome the limitations of keyword- and content-based visual information access, an ontology-driven framework is developed. Under the proposed framework, an appropriately defined ontology infrastructure is used to drive the generation of manual and automatic image annotations and to enable semantic retrieval by exploiting the formal semantics of ontologies. In this way, the descriptions considered in the tedious task of manual annotation are constrained to named entities (e.g. location names, person names, etc.), since the ontology-driven analysis module automatically generates annotations concerning common domain objects of interest (e.g. sunset, trees, sea, etc.). Experiments in the domain of outdoor images show that such an ontology-based scheme realizes efficient visual information access with respect to its semantics.