Image segmentation search engine: Advanced access to an image archive database

As long as innovative channels are going to be accessible, the digital archives need to integrate new technologies and services for digital image processing and delivery. The possibility to search images by means of features and other images and not only with keywords, seems to be an important challenge. The Alinari's image-archive research department is testing some specific search agents able to “retrieve images by images”: a customer could be interested to find all the images that are someway similar to one specific image he chooses (i.e. a family photo). European SCHEMA project (IST-2001-32795) is currently working on object and region segmentation algorithms and with the Qimera platform has obtained very good results. This paper refers to Alinari's application cases and tests
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