How to Make a Query in Image Retrieval with Partial Information Extracted from Multiple Image Samples?

Abstract

The existing image retrieval methods generally require at least one complete image as a query sample. From the practical point of view, a user may not have an image sample in hand for query. Instead, partial information from multiple image samples would be available. This paper therefore attempts to deal with this problem by presenting a novel framework that allows a user to make an image query composed of several partial information extracted from multiple image samples via Boolean operations (i.e. AND, OR and NOT). Based on the request from the query, a Descriptor Cluster Label Table (DCLT) is designed to efficiently find out the result of Boolean operations on partial information. Experiments show the promising result of the proposed framework on commodity query and criminal investigation, respectively, although it is essentially applicable to different scenarios as well by changing descriptors.