Patent ID: 8238663

Claim:
A similar image search apparatus comprising: a storage unit that stores images and pieces of text information described about the respective images, the images which are associated with the respective pieces of text information; a search unit that retrieves candidate images from the images stored in the storage unit, each candidate image which has a similar image feature to an image feature of a key image; a text feature selection unit that (i) extracts text features from the pieces of text information which are associated with the respective candidate images and (ii) selects a text feature which satisfies a given selecting condition from the extracted text features; an image feature transformation unit that, based on the selected text feature, transforms (i) the image features of the candidate images and (ii) the image feature of the key image; and a similar image search unit that retrieves similar images from the candidate images based on the transformed image features of the candidate images and the transformed image feature of the key image, wherein image features of the similar images are similar to the image feature of the key image, and wherein the image feature transformation unit transforms (i) the image features of the candidate images and (ii) the image feature of the key image by generating transformed image feature vectors which reflect the degree of similarity of images and which constitute feature data likely to facilitate discrimination of a disease.