Image collector: an image-gathering system from the world-wide web employing keyword-based search engines

Due to the recent explosive progress of WWW (World-Wide Web), we can easily access a large number of images from WWW. There are, however, no established methods to make use of WWW as a large image database. In this paper, we describe an automatic image-gathering system from WWW employing keywords and image features, which is called the Image Collector. By exploiting some existing keyword-based search engines and selecting images by their image features, our system obtains, with high accuracy, images that are strongly related to query keywords. We have implemented the system that gathers more than one hundred images from WWW in about five minutes.