Distinguishing photographs and graphics on the World Wide Web

When we search for images in multimedia documents, we often have in mind specific image types that we are interested in; examples are photographs, graphics, maps, cartoons, portraits of people, and so on. This paper describes an automated system that classifies Web images as photographs or graphics. The design of the system is based on statistical observations about the image content of the two types, as well as learning techniques which make use of the vast amount of training data available on the Web. Text associated with the image can be used to further improve the accuracy of the classification. The system is used as a part of Webseer, an image search engine for the Web