Patent ID: 6415282
Filing Date: 2002-07-02
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
A method for refining a first query applied to a database of images, the method comprising the steps of:selecting one of a plurality of modes of clustering results of the first query, wherein the modes of clustering include clustering by one of text, image and Universal Resource Locator (URL); and retrieving cluster groups containing the results of the first query, the cluster groups having been clustered in accordance with the selected mode of clustering, wherein when the selected mode of clustering is clustering by text, the cluster groups have been formed in a preprocessing procedure comprising the steps of: (a) representing each of the images in the database in a vector space model, where V represents a unique set of keywords assigned to the images, where each of the images is represented by a vector of length |V|; (b) calculating a similarity value between each pair of the images, thereby forming a similarity matrix, wherein the similarity value is measured by the cosine of the angle between the vector of the respective images, the similarity value being further normalized to a value between 0 and 1; (c) storing the similarity value in the similarity matrix only when the similarity value is greater than a first threshold value; (d) clustering the images based on the normalized similarity value; and (e) determining a topic for each of the cluster groups; and the method for refining a first query filer comprising displaying the cluster groups, each of the cluster groups being visually represented by a graphical element; and refining the results of the first query using members of the cluster groups as elements of a refined query.