Jesse S. Jin, Ruth Kurniawati, Guangyu Xu and Xuesheng Bai,
Using Browsing to Improve Content-Based Image Retrieval,
In C.-C. Jay Kuo, Shih-Fu Chang and Sethuraman
Panchanathan eds., Multimedia Storage and Archiving Systems III (VV02),
Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Vol. 3527 of SPIE Proceedings, pp. 101-109, November 1998. (SPIE Symposium on Voice, Video and Data Communications)Many content-based methods have been proposed to retrieve images from multimedia databases, Current index structures, such as R^*-tree, SS-tree and SS^+-tree, have a large overlapping area among their nodes, especially at the high level of the indexing tree. The overlapping area causes the search engine to compare a large number of nodes and hence, it is very inefficient to retrieve at very high levels of the index tree. We present a scheme to combine browsing with retrieval in searching for images. The browser uses the content-based index structure of image databases. It provides users with a visual tool to narrow the search quickly to a small region and to avoid a large number of comparisons. Combined with retrieval, it produces a very efficient content-based retrieval method.