Comparison and combination of textual and visual features for interactive cross-language image retrieval

This paper concentrates on the user-centered search task at Image-CLEF 2004. In this work, we combine both textual and visual features for cross-language image retrieval, and propose two interactive retrieval systems -T_ICLEF and VCT_ICLEF. The first one incorporates a relevance feedback mechanism based on textual information while the second one combines textual and image information to help users find a target image. The experimental results show that VCT_ICLEF had a better performance in almost all cases. Overall, it helped users find the topic image within a fewer iterations with a maximum of 2 iterations saved. Our user survey also reported that a combination of textual and visual information is helpful to indicate to the system what a user really wanted in mind.