A World Wide Web region-based image search engine

The development of an intelligent image content-based search engine for the World-Wide Web is presented. This system will offer a new form of media representation and access of content available in the WWW. Information web crawlers continuously traverse the Internet and collect images that are subsequently indexed based on integrated feature vectors. As a basis for the indexing, the K-means algorithm is used, modified so as to take into account the coherence of the regions. Based on the extracted regions, characteristic features are extracted using color texture and shape/region boundary information. These features along with additional information such as the URL location and the date of index procedure are stored in a database. The user can access and search this indexed content through the Web with an advanced and user-friendly interface. The output of the system is a set of links to the content available in the WWW, ranked according to their similarity to the image submitted by the user. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the system