Modeling Image Data for Effective Indexing and Retrieval in Large General Image Databases

In this paper, we propose an image semantic model based on the knowledge and criteria in the field of linguistics and taxonomy. Our work bridges the "semantic gap" by seamlessly exploiting the synergy of both visual feature processing and semantic relevance computation in a new way, and provides improved query efficiency and effectiveness for large general image databases. Our main contributions are as follows: we design novel data structures, namely, a lexical hierarchy, an image-semantic hierarchy, and a number of atomic semantic domains, to capture the semantics and the features of the database, and to provide the indexing scheme. We present a novel image query algorithm based on the proposed structures. In addition, we propose a novel term expansion mechanism to improve the lexical processing. Our extensive experiments indicate that our proposed techniques are effective in achieving high runtime performance with improved retrieval accuracy. The experiments also show that the proposed method has good scalability.