The PicSOM Retrieval System: Description and Evaluations

Abstract

We have developed an experimental system called PicSOM for retrieving images similar to a given set of reference images in large unannotated image databases. The technique is based on a hierarchical variant of the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) called the Tree Structured Self-Organizing Map (TS-SOM). Given a set of reference images, PicSOM is able to retrieve another set of images which are most similar to the given ones. Each TS-SOM is formed using a different image feature representation like color, texture, or shape. A new technique introduced in PicSOM facilitates automatic combination of the responses from multiple TS-SOMs and their hierarchical levels. This mechanism adapts to the user's preferences in selecting which images resemble each other. In this paper, a brief description of the system and a set of methods applicable to evaluating retrieval performance of image retrieval applications are presented. 1 Introduction Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been a subject...