Image Indexing and Retrieval for a Vietnamese Folk Paintings Gallery

Cultural aspects such as history, tradition, beliefs and social customs are often depicted in paintings, both explicitly and implicitly. This paper discusses our experience and difficulties encountered while creating a multimedia Vietnamese Traditional Paintings Gallery for the purpose of dissemination and analysis of information regarding the cultural and artistic aspects of these painting . Issues regarding indexing and retrieval are analysed, which provide the motivations for our own approach which combines keyword and visual features-based methods with iconclass-based method used in arts and humanities. The use of XML-based language to express semantic content and Bayesian inference network to cater for vague queries are also discussed.