An effective World Wide Web image search engine

Effective World Wide Web image retrieval systems are required to locate relevant images as more and more images are used in HTML documents. There are two general approaches to image retrieval: one is based on text descriptions and the other on image contents (low-level features, such as colour and texture). They have their respective strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we describe how to improve text-based and content-based image retrieval techniques and to integrate these two types of techniques in one system to take advantage of their complementing strengths. Our experimental results show that the integrated approach has higher retrieval performance than either the text-based or the content-based techniques used by themselves.