Searching the Web for Peculiar Images based on hand-made concept hierarchies

Most researches on Image Retrieval (IR) have aimed at clearing away noisy images and allowing users to search only acceptable images for a target object specified by its object-name. We have become able to get enough acceptable images of a target object just by submitting its object-name to a conventional keyword-based Web image search engine. However, because the search results rarely include its uncommon images, we can often get only its common images and cannot easily get exhaustive knowledge about its appearance (look and feel). As next steps of IR, it is very important to discriminate between “Typical Images” and “Peculiar Images” in the acceptable images, and moreover, to collect many different kinds of peculiar images exhaustively. This paper proposes a method to search the Web for peculiar images by expanding or modifying a target object-name (as an original query) with its hyponyms based on hand-made concept hierarchies such as WordNet and Wikipedia.