Selective Visual Attention: Computational Models and Applications

7.4 Image Retrieval via Visual Attention

Along with the rapid development of computer internet and multimedia techniques, a huge amount of the digital images are generated every day, from both military and civilian equipment, which include much useful information. However, since these digital images are randomly distributed around the world, the useful information cannot be accessed and used by users if there is no technique to solve the problem. Image retrieval is a method to quickly and accurately retrieve required images. With the growing size of digital image collections, image retrieval became a very hot research area in the 1970s. The development of image retrieval is based on the promotion of database and computer vision, thus it combines both characteristics of them and forms a new research area.

Early image retrieval was mainly based on text [77–79], where images were annotated by text or keywords in a database, and then the description of the required image was used for retrieval with the aid of exact text match or a match based on probability. However, this image retrieval method faces some difficulties. One is that manual image annotation needs a vast amount of labour, especially for the collection of hundreds and thousands of images. Second, the manual image annotation, in general, is not accurate or complete, since different people have different views to the same image. Therefore the subjective difference between individuals results in mismatch error in retrieval. ...