Next-generation Web searches for visual content

Major search engines such as Hotbot (http://www.hotbot.com) help us find text on the Web, but typically have few or no capabilities for finding visual media. Yet many Web users, such as magazine editors or professional Web site designers, need to find images using just a few global features. My colleagues and I developed a prototype system called ImageScape (http://skynet.liacs.nl) to find visual media over intranets and the Web. The system integrates technologies such as vector quantization-based compression of the image database and k-d trees for fast searching over high-dimensional spaces.