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Monday, January 26, 2009

Octagon - content based image retrieval software.

Content based image retrieval (CBIR) means that images can be searched by their visual content. For example you can pick landscape image of mountains and try to find similar scenes with similar color and/or similar shapes. Traditional way to find images is to first assign keywords to images and then use textual query to find needed images. Writing keywords to hundreds or thousands of image is a tedious and error prone task. Using CBIR can images be analyzed by different methods which represent different aspects of visual information of images. Image searching and image archival can be greatly speeded up using automatic image analysis tools.

Content based image retrieval (CBIR) is a two phase process: first images are analyzed and inserted to the image database and after that they can be queried. Query is issued by giving an example image or by starting with random images from current images in database. Query continues so that images can be marked as positive or negative samples to refine search and to get better results.

What to expect from Octagon, check out screen shots. Query efficiency and accuracy depends on the images used, so you need to try with your own images before making heavy judgments.

Octagon features

  • Free Java software that runs for example on Windows, Linux and Macintosh.
  • Searches images by their visual appearance.
  • Search images by keywords (beta).
  • Keywords are automatically extracted from image files (IPTC headers).
  • You can find images by color.
  • You can query images by structure.
  • Combined color and structure searching.
  • Very easy and quick usage.
  • Jpeg-support (others will be added)
  • Supports many raw image formats for Canon, Nikon, Minolta, Pentax, Olympus and Kodak (check full list of camera models)

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