Picturefinder: Description Logics for Semantic Image Retrieval

Large amount of images need an efficient way of retrieving them. The usual approach of manually annotating images and/or providing a syntactic retrieval capability lacks flexibility and comfort. The automatic annotation of images is a main target of the image retrieval community. These so-called content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems focus on primitive features, as Eakins and Graham (1999) name them. Description logics (DL) offer a useful contribution to content-based image retrieval while allowing logical reasoning about the semantic contents of the image and ending with consistent classification results. This is a main advantage about traditional classification algorithms. Another advantage is the possibility to use domain knowledge, which is formulated in DL, on the retrieval side, thus offering a semantic retrieval. In this paper, we present an approach and the results of adopting a DL for classifying image regions