Hierarchically searching the web for images
N.J. Jewell · 1999
We have been developing approaches intended to aid the searching of the World Wide Web for images. Initially these are based upon the contextual infor-mation that we can obtain from existing text-based search engines with the ultimate intention of apply-ing the work to a distributed image database. Sup-plying a search engine with a phrase describing an image subject provides a set of potentially related documents, and contained within those documents a set of images in which the user may be interested. These images are then ltered to remove unsuitable examples and those remaining are presented to the user in an informative manner to enable rapid brows-ing, and if necessary, renement. We present the initial ndings of this work, along with some preliminary results and conclusions. We have experimented with methods for arranging the ltered images in a 2-dimensional space, using Sam-mon's Mapping and Self-Organising Maps, based upon simple image features. An approach such as this has demonstrated some interesting concepts, and enabled us to produce an intuitive, hierarchical im-age browser.