Supporting Ranked Boolean Similarity Queries in MARS

To address the emerging needs of applications that require access to and retrieval of multimedia objects we are developing the Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval System MARS in our group at the University of Illinois In this paper we concentrate on the retrieval subsystem of MARS and its support for content based queries over image databases Content based retrieval techniques have been extensively studied for textual documents in the area of automatic information retrieval This paper describes how these techniques can be adapted for ranked retrieval over image databases Speci cally we discuss the ranking and retrieval algorithms developed in MARS based on the Boolean retrieval model and describe the results of our experiments that demonstrate the e ectiveness of the developed model for image retrieval