Pattern-based Image Retrieval with Constraints and Preferences on ImageCLEF 2004

This paper presents the approach used by the University of Alicante in the ImageCLEF 2004 adhoc retrieval task. This task is performed through multilingual search requests (topics) against an historic photographic collection in which images are accompanied with English captions. This approach uses these captions to perform retrieval and is based on a set of constraints and preferences that allow the rejection or scoring of images for the retrieval task. The constraints are implemented through a set of co-occurrence patterns based on regular expressions and the approach is extended in one of the experiments with the use of WordNet synonyms.