Indexing Digital Images Based on Overlap

Image retrieval currently relies heavily on metadata and present search engines do not exploit spatial relations between images. Therefore searching for images of a certain location manually is a time consuming task. Typically there are pair wise spatial relations in an unsorted set of photos taken at the same location from different angles and different viewpoints. By identifying and indexing spatial relations of different photos an image search engine can provide additional results based on these relationships. This paper presents a novel approach to identify pair wise spatial relations between images and a method to index and search through the identified spatial relations. We further describe an application, which implements this robust and surprisingly simple technique.