Imagination-based image search system with dynamic query creation and its application

An imagination-based image search system is a new environment to acquire unknown but desired images by queries, which reflects user's dynamic imagination process. It leads to a new computation environment for searching images data resources in a contextual way. This paper presents a dynamic image-query creation method for imagination-based image search system and its application for travel information associated with scenery images. The main feature of our system is to extend analytical functions for image search, not only in retrieval processing, but also in query manipulation, according to the color-based combination of images with common features. A query creation method in this system is a novel approach to represent a user's imagination process. This method enables a user to create dynamically a query, which reflects the user's intention, impression and memory as his/her own context existing only his/her mind by color-based combinations of existent images in the real world. The proposed method consists of five operations for creating image-query vector from combinations of images, which are "plus", "intersection", "accumulation", as local operations and "minus" and "difference" as global operations. Using the imagination-based image search system for travel information associated with scenery images, users can easily discover images and information of places where they never been. The system performs a series of qualitative and quantitative experiments to examine the feasibility, effectiveness of proposed method and scalability of the system.