A Metadatabase System for Semantic Image Search by a Mathematical Model of Meaning

In the design of multimedia database systems, one of the most important issues is to extract images dynamically according to the user's impression and the image's contents. In this paper, we present a metadatabase system which realizes the semantic associative search for images by giving keywords representing the user's impression and the image's contents.This metadatabase system provides several functions for performing the semantic associative search for images by using the metadata representing the features of images. These functions are realized by using our proposed mathematical model of meaning. The mathematical model of meaning is extended to compute specific meanings of keywords which are used for retrieving images unambiguously and dynamically. The main feature of this model is that the semantic associative search is performed in the orthogonal semantic space. This space is created for dynamically computing semantic equivalence or similarity between the metadata items of the images and keywords.