Content-based image retrieval in the World Wide Web: a web agent for fetching portraits

This article propose a way to automatically retrieve images from the world-wide-web using a semantic description for images and an agent concept for the retrieval of images. The system represents image in a textual way, e.g. look for a portrait of the a specific person, or fetch an image showing a countryside in Southern California. This textual descriptions are fed in search machines, e.g. yahoo, alta- vista. The resulting html documents are seeked for links. The next step subsequently processes each link by fetching the document other the net, converting it to an ascii representation, and performing a full text search by using the image description. This leads to starting points of images which are retrieved via a web-agent. The image descriptions are decomposed in a set of parts containing image operations which are further processed, e.g. a set for representing the background of a portrait tries to find a homogeneous region in the image because this is likely to find in a portrait. Additional operations are performed on the foreground, i.e. the image region which contains e.g. the face of a person. The system is realized using two C++ libraries: one for building up web-agents, LIWA++, and one for processing images, HORUS.