Combining image and structured text retrieval

Two common approaches in retrieving images from a collection are retrieval by text keywords and retrieval by visual content. However, it is widely recognised that it is impossible for keywords alone to fully describe visual content. This paper reports on the participation of the RMIT University group in the INEX 2005 multimedia track, where we investigated our approach of combining evidence from a content-oriented XML retrieval system and a content-based image retrieval system using a linear combination of evidence. Our approach yielded the best overall result for the INEX 2005 Multimedia track using the standard evaluation measures. We have extended our work by varying the parameter for the linear combination of evidence, and we have also examined the performance of runs submitted by participants by using the newly proposed HiXEval evaluation metric. We show that using CBIR in conjunction with text search leads to better retrieval performance.