Hybrid Ontology and Visual-Based Retrieval for Cultural Heritage Multimedia Libraries

Nowadays, an increasingly growing demand for the creation of digital multimedia libraries is arising, as huge amounts of digital visual content are becoming available. The content that resides in these libraries should be easily retrievable and classified in order to be fully accessible. This paper introduces a hybrid multimedia retrieval model accompanied by the presentation of a search engine that is capable of retrieving visual content cultural heritage multimedia libraries as in three modes: (i) based on semantic annotation with the help of an ontology; (ii) based on the visual features with a view to finding similar content; and (iii) based on the combination of these two strategies. The main novelty is the way in which these two co-operate transparently during the evaluation of a single query in a hybrid fashion, making recommendations to the user and retrieving content that is both visually and semantically similar.