Most existing Web image search engines exploit the text information
associated with images (e.g., from the surrounding text, or image title) to index
images. It is still difficult and challenging to search images into the image content.
Tagging is a solution, but is limited in some specific styles or types (e.g., dominant
color, clip art, line drawing, or photo). In this chapter, we present a new interactive
image search system, which enables users to interactively indicate the search intention,
how the colors are spatially distributed in desired images, by scribbling a few
color strokes or dragging an image and highlighting a few regions of interest in an
intuitive way. Moreover, we propose an effective scheme to mine the latent search
intention from the user’s input. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness
and efficiency of the proposed system.
Keywords: Image search, color sketch, intention map, image content, interactive image
search, QBIC, spatial correspondence, spatial relation, contextual color map, color
similarity, spatial occurrence
