Visual search engine

A Visual Search Engine is a search engine designed to search for information on the World Wide Web through the input of an image or a search engine with a visual display of the search results. Information may consist of web pages, locations, other images and other types of documents. This type of search engines is mostly used to search on the mobile Internet through an image of an unknown object (unknown search query). Examples are buildings in a foreign city. These search engines often use techniques for Content Based Image Retrieval.

A visual search engine searches images, patterns based on an algorithm which it could recognize and gives relative information based on the selective or apply pattern match technique.

Depending on the nature of the search engine there are two main groups, those which aim to find visual information and those with a visual display of results.

An image search is a search engine that is designed to find an image. The search can be based on keywords, a picture, or a web link to a picture. The results depend on the search criterion, such as metadata, distribution of color, shape, etc., and the search technique which the browser uses.

Two techniques currently used in image search:

Search by metadata: Image search is based on comparison of metadata associated with the image as keywords, text, etc.. and it is obtained a set of images sorted by relevance. The metadata associated with each image can reference the title of the image, format, color, etc.. and can be generated manually or automatically. This metadata generation process is called audiovisual indexing.

Search by example: In this technique, also called content-based image retrieval, the search results are obtained through the comparison between images using computer vision techniques. During the search it is examined the content of the image such as color, shape, texture or any visual information that can be extracted from the image. This system requires a higher computational complexity, but is more efficient and reliable than search by metadata.

There are image searchers that combine both search techniques, as the first search is done by entering a text, and then, from the images obtained can refine the search using as search parameters the images which appear as a result.

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Wikipedia