Model for interactive retrieval of videos and still images

No single mechanism can be expected to give optimal retrieval in all cases and many problems have been reported concerning the difficulty of making a unique choice at the design stage of information retrieval systems. The paper presents a flexible model for the information retrieval process, which provides relevance feedback facilities and embodies a mechanism to exploit a typology of information needs. Various alternatives for information retrieval primitives are integrated in a single framework. We study the adequacy of this model to the retrieval of multimedia documents, namely pictures and videos. Multimedia documents and queries are commonly represented by a simple list of attribute-descriptor pairs. Introducing a facet level in descriptions allows to give a more expressive role to each keyword. This rather simple model is nevertheless well exploited by the proposed IR model which takes benefits from the faceted structure all along the search process.