SHOW AND TELL: A Seamlessly Integrated Tool For Searching with Image Content And Text

In this paper, an image search tool that combines keyword and image content feature querying and search is presented. The developed search tool tries to bridge the gap between commercial search engines, which are based on keyword search, and CBIR (Content Based Image Retrieval) systems developed mostly in the academic field, designed to search based on image content. The tool is implemented by building on and extending the open source text-based search engine Nutch and its powerful Lucene based crawling and indexing capabilities. Several user friendly search options are provided to allow users to query the index using not only words, but also by showing an image example, as well as image feature descriptions. Even though we evaluate the developed tool by running a set of controlled experiments on the COREL’ 5000 image database, the developed search tool is able to crawl images from the World Wide Web at a larger scale.