Automatic storing and retrieval of large collections of images

This paper, presents a system, SISTER, that is suitable for storing and retrieve of large collections of images allowing the user to formulate queries for different image categories on the basis of color information and specific attributes of the image category; this is possible, because SISTER can be easily adapted to support new image categories specializing the acquisition and the retrieval subsystems. SISTER is composed of three parts: i) an image acquisition subsystem automatically extracting the attributes from images, ii) a database management subsystem maintaining the descriptions of images, and iii) a retrieval subsystem allowing the user to retrieve images through a user-friendly graphical interface. The acquisition subsystem extracts image attributes combining image processing and inductive classification modules. Classification modules are useful because they may allow the extraction of attributes that cannot be extracted through image processing techniques and because they may allow the reduction of the error percentage made by the image processing modules in the acquisition of image attributes.