New image retrieval paradigm: logical composition of region categories

We present a novel framework for intelligent search and retrieval by image content composition. Very different from the existing query-by-example paradigm, logical queries are expressed using categories of similar regions without any starting example region. The set of region category representatives constitutes the "photometric region thesaurus" of the image database. Logical composition of region categories expresses the presence and absence of certain types of regions in images to retrieve and allows to integrate visual semantics in the search. Resulting indexing and retrieval implementation turns out to be simple and very fast even on very complex query compositions and large image database. It was tested on a database of 9,995 images from the Corel Photostock.