A Soft Computing Approach For Image Searching Using Visual Re-Ranking

Rapid advances in computers and communication technology is pushing the existing information processing tools to their limits. The past few years have seen an overwhelming accumulation of media rich digital data such as images, video, and audio. The internet is an excellent example of a distributed database containing several millions of images. Image search has become a popular feature in many search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc., majority of which use very little, if any, image information. Image Retrieval system is a powerful tool in order to manage large scale image databases. Retrieving images from large and varied collections using image content as a key is a challenging and important problem. Due to the success of text based search of Web pages and in part, to the difficulty and expense of using image based signals,most search engines return images solely based on the text of the pages from which the images are linked. No image analysis takes place to determine relevance/quality. This can yield results of inconsistent quality.