Multimedia indexing and fast retrieval based on a vote system

We present a new system, called Retimm, for searching databases made of documents containing images and text. Images are indexed by color and texture distributions. Color and texture classes are obtained by a quantization adapted to the whole database. Signatures are ranked m times, once for each dimension, but values are not stored. The search engine works as a vote system: the score for each document is the total of the votes of all coordinates, these last votes depending on a k-nn search on each dimension. Retimm is able to retrieve very quickly images from large databases from any request composed of one or several images and/or one or several words. The system is interactive, since the query can be modified at any moment by adding or removing images or words