Interactive Image Search by Color Map

The availability of large-scale images from the Internet has made the research on image search attract a lot of attention. Text-based image search engines, for example, Google/Microsoft Bing/Yahoo! image search engines using the surrounding text, have been developed and widely used. However, they suffer from an inability to search image content. In this article, we present an interactive image search system, image search by color map, which can be applied to, but not limited to, enhance text-based image search. This system enables users to indicate how the colors are spatially distributed in the desired images, by scribbling a few color strokes, or dragging an image and highlighting a few regions of interest in an intuitive way. In contrast to the conventional sketch-based image retrieval techniques, our system searches images based on colors rather than shapes, and we, technically, propose a simple but effective scheme to mine the latent search intention from the user’s input, and exploit the dominant color filter strategy to make our system more efficient. We integrate our system to existing Web image search engines to demonstrate its superior performance over text-based image search. The user study shows that our system can indeed help users conveniently find desired images.