Retrieving Images by Concepts and Structure

                        Goffredo Pieroni 

                       University of Udine

Images and videos are increasingly used in several application areas
including defense, biomedicine, military reconnaissance, law enforcement and
criminal investigation, territorial monitoring, entertainment, and news.
Several interesting applications in the area of art galleries and museum
management have been also envisioned. The development of Internet
desperately needs a reliable system for storing and retrieving images of
places, objects, people both steady and in motion, based on concepts and
structures. The identification of images and videos by concepts will allow
the integration of visual documents with text and sound for constructing, in
the near future, real multimedia reasoning systems. The aspects of a
possible system capable of identifying concepts on images, allowing in such
a way a process of image retrieval by concepts, have been investigated. A
prototype, based on image geometry decomposition techniques and selective
image objects recomposition by using an analog expert system, has been
constructed. This technique is, in some way, similar to what humans do when
solving a jigsaw puzzle with the help of shape, texture, and colors of the
pieces. Examples will be shown.