An image-query creation method for representing impression by color-based combination of multiple images

This paper presents a dynamic image-query creation and metadata extraction method with semantic correlation computation between color-combinations and impressions of multiple image data. The main features of our method are (1) to create an image-query which reflects user's intention dynamically according to the color-based combinations of images with common features selected by a user as context, (2) to extract appropriate impression by each image collection which cannot be easily extracted from a single image, (3) to provide users an image retrieval environment reflecting historical and cultural semantics and impression of color especially for cultural properties, and (4) to enable an image retrieval environment for the collection of images by time, culture, author e.t.c.. The queries are created by the combination of multiple image sets and operations, which are intersection, accumulation, average, difference of color elements of sample images. First, a set of multiple images with common features is set as sample data for a query creation. Second, color histograms are extracted from the image sets for creating feature vector of a query. Third, the correlations between an image-query vector and target image vectors are calculated on a space which represents the relationship between color and the impression according to historical and cultural semantics of color. This image-query creation method representing impression of color makes it possible to expand the range of image retrieval for a large number of image data of cultural property in digital archives, such as electronic library and electronic museum, automatically.