Prototyping and browsing image databases using linguistic summaries

A new approach for the summarization of image databases is described. A linguistic description of images is first generated from its low level features such as color. An original incremental summary process, called SAINTETIQ is then applied to the images, leading to a comprehensive hierarchically organized set of summaries of parts of the database. The summary process is driven by data and relies on the background knowledge represented by a fuzzy relational thesaurus. It provides both a proximity measure between terms of color domain, and a way to produce generalized descriptions of summaries. Finally, this article points out usages of the summaries. A new method to browse image databases is then presented as well as a way to produce relevant prototypes from groups of images. Those tasks take advantage of the linguistic descriptions of summaries provided by SAINTETIQ