ABSTRACT
Information technology systems are capable, in general, of storing at a low cost large volumes of pictorial data and we should anticipate a growth in the use of pictures and hence an increased reliance on pictorial databases. However, pictorial databases will only be useful to the extent to which that allows the flexible and rapid search.
This paper argues that, in general, information technology systems are capable of storing at low cost large volumes of pictorial data and hence we should anticipate an increased reliance on pictorial databases. However, pictorial databases will only be useful to the extent to which that allow flexible and rapid search. A distinction between depictive and descriptive representations is made and it is argued that visual depictions, such as drawings, are useful for representing visual-spatial properties of pictures.
Earlier methods for accessing pictorial databases make no provision for depictive search. In this paper, a system that provides methods that include search by depiction is described. Essentially the user creates a ‘sketch’ of the target picture from which the system extracts descriptions that are matched to descriptions of the pictures in the database.
- Stephen Scrivener (UK), artist, computer scientist, LUTCHI Research Centre
University of Technology, Loughborough, UK
- Stephen Charles (UK), computer scientist, computer scientist, LUTCHI Research Centre
University of Technology, Loughborough, UK