Multimodal search for effective image retrieval

In this paper we present a multimodal approach for effectively searching and retrieving images. The proposed multimodal image query and retrieval (MIQR) method uses two or more types of query for accessing images - textual annotation associated with images and visual appearance, such as color, texture and positional features of objects in sample images. A user places a keyword-based query first and then retrieves desired images by visual content-based query. A prototype MIQR system was implemented and is available at http://140.113.216.66/WebImageSearch for online demo, and public evaluation. We also conducted experiments over a categorized Corel image collection and a non-categorized WWW image collection to show the performance of the proposed MIQR method.