Patent ID: 6999636

Claim:
An image search method of searching for a desired image from a plurality of images stored in storage means, comprising: a designation step of designating an arbitrary region in a search source image; a segmenting step of segmenting the search source image into a plurality of segmented regions; a first calculating step of calculating, for each segmented region of the plurality of segmented regions, a ratio of a region belonging to the designated arbitrary region to the segmented region; a setting step of setting a weight value, for each segmented region of the plurality of segmented regions, corresponding to the ratio of each segmented region of the plurality of segmented regions calculated in the first calculating step; a second calculation step of calculating image similarities between the search source image and each of the plurality of images stored in the storage means by comparing the plurality of segmented regions of the search source image and segmented regions of each of the plurality of images stored in the storage means using the weight values set in the setting step; and an acquisition step of acquiring an image as a search result from the plurality of images on the basis of the image similarities calculated in the second calculation step.