Using Natural Language Processing for Semantic Indexing of Scene-of-Crime Photographs

In this paper we present a new approach to the automatic semantic indexing of digital photographs based on the extraction of logic relations from their textual descriptions. The method is based on shallow parsing and propositional analysis of the descriptions using an ontology for the domain of application. We describe the semantic representation formalism, the ontology, and the algorithms involved in the automatic derivation of semantic indexes from texts linked to images. The method has been integrated into the Scene of the Crime Information System, a crime management system for storing, indexing and retrieval of crime information.