Digital image databases have seen an enormous growth over the last few years. However, since many image collections are poorly indexed or annotated, there is a great need for developing automated, content-based methods that would help users to retrieve images from these databases. In recent times, a lot of attention has been paid to the management of an overwhelming accumulation of rich digital images to support various search strategies. In order to improve the traditional text-based or SQL (Structured Query Language)-based database searches, research has been focused on efficient access to large image databases by the contents of images, such as color, shape, and texture. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has become an important research topic that covers a large number of domains like image processing, computer vision, very large databases, and human computer interaction (Smeulders, Worring, Santini, Gupta & Jain, 2000). Several content-based image retrieval systems and methods have recently been developed.
An Extensible Query Language for Content Based Image Retrieval
