Visual Description Conversion for Enhancing Search Engines and Navigational Systems

In using web search engines, there are cases where the name of the target object is unavailable, and the user can only give the visual descriptions of the object. The existing keyword-based search engines have limited capabilities under such situations. In the real-space oriented search engines also, there are often cases where the user wants to search using the visual characteristics of the object. In the car or walk navigation systems, the visual descriptions of the buildings are often more useful than their names, when traveling in an unfamiliar area. As a fundamental technology for converting names and visual descriptions of objects, we investigate the method of extracting these pairs from large size texts, such as the Web and encyclopedias. The extracted information is integrated to meet the requirements for such conversions.