Design by a CBIR System Supporting High Level Concepts

Abstract

Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems that are able to “retrieve images of Clinton with Lewinsky” are unrealistic at present. However, this area has seen much research and development activity since IBM’s QBIC announcement in 1994. The CHITRA CBIR system under development at the RMIT and Monash Universities, addresses the need for a test bed system. Users can dynamically incorporate new features and similarity measures in to the system, enabling it to act as a testbed for CBIR research. The system uses a 4-level data model we have developed and supports definition and querying of high level concepts such as MOUNTAIN and SUNSET. These advanced capabilities are supported by a powerful graphical query mechanism and a high-dimensional indexing structure based on linear mapping. In this paper we describe the design of the system, our contributions to the state of the art and provide some implementation details.