Defining image content with multiple regions-of-interest

With the proliferation of multimedia, the World Wide Web and digital imaging, there now exists a high demand for intelligent tools for image management; most importantly, indexing and retrieval-commonly referred to as "query-by-image-content". Existing systems often make use of global attributes, such as overall color distributions, which ignore the actual composition of the image in terms of internal structures. In this paper, we present an experimental image retrieval system designed and based on the principle that it is the user who is most qualified to specify the "content" in an image, and not the computer. Consequently, the user is asked to provide salient "regions-of-interest" (ROIs) and to specify the importance of their relative spatial relationships in the query image. Our technique has led to acceptable retrievals (equal to if not better than global-based searches), and it provides an intuitive user interface and more flexibility in specifying image content.