New scheme to aid image search featured on Phys.org news site

Online databases now contain huge numbers of images. However there is only limited ability to search within these databases for an image with particular characteristics. Systems may rely on images being annotated with meaningful descriptions - "metadata".

Peter Wonka (of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and Paul Guerrero and Niloy Mitra (both from University College London) wanted to add something more powerful to the currently limited repertoire of image search tools without adding extra metadata to existing images. They devised a query tool they call a relation-augmented image descriptor (RAID) that takes either a written description or sketch of objects in a specific spatial relationship and searches for matches in the image database based on relatively simple geometric processing.

RAID allows searches using a sentence such as 'person standing on snowboard' or a simple sketch of the desired composition of objects or an example image with the desired object composition.

The work has been featured on the Phys.org science news website and in ACM TechNews.