Webview: A Distributed Geographical Image Retrieval System

With the increasing number of geographical image databases on the Internet, it is a very important issue to know about the most relevant image databases for given user queries, in order to achieve high efficiency in retrieving the images. To address this problem, we have developed a novel system, Webview, which intelligently ranks the distributed geographical image databases based on their visual content. Our system summarizes the visual content of each database in a metadatabase, which is a collection of automatically generated image templates and statistical metadata. With the metadatabase, our system can guide the user queries toward the most relevant image databases in a distributed environment.