Pattern Recognition Letters 4 (1986) 477-480 December 1986 North-Holland A picture and text query and archiving system L.F. PAU Technical UniversiO, ql" Denmark, Bldg 348, DK 2800 Lyngby, Denmark Received 11 August 1986 .4bstract: A large picture and text archiving system, with query facilities, has been developped for a variety of applications. Variable sized images, and their corresponding captions or descriptive files, are stored in two different segments (eventually on different media). By keyword-based queries, with logical predicates, the images satisfying the search criteria are retrieved, transferred through a high speed data link, and displayed on a monitor, together with the corresponding overlaid caption. The displayed image can then be processed on a local image workstation, without loading the host. Performances are given, as well as current extensions such as a natural language front-end. Applications are in remote sensing, mapping, document files, news services, medical images, security systems, inspection. Key words." hnage archiving, image database, image editing, text databases, image manipulation, remote sensing, mapping, document processing, news services, security systems, medical images, inspection. 1. Introduction Picture archiving and distribution are becoming more and more important, as image processors become more widely accessible; image distribution networks are also established between major archiving and processing centers and distributed microcomputer based workstations. The main applications are for: -remote sensing imagery, - news pictures, - medical images, - inspection, - document processing, - mapping. These applications have been the motivations behind earlier reported work on either image data- base systems [1, 2], or natural language communi- cation with image databases [3, 4]. Whereas many thoughts and development work are going into mass storage systems and picture archiving system architectures, only few portable and finalized software packages are actually available. Next, even fewer offer multiuser query possibilities (relational or not) jointly for the images and for text (including but not restricted to the image captions). Finally, little work has gone into merging the diversity of mass storage media (disk, tape, optical disk, VTR) into the capabilities of said software. This paper presents an operational picture and text archiving software package (PICTURE-BASIS), as well as some of its extensions under develop- ment, and user performances. 2. Architecture of PICTURE-BASIS (see Figure 1) 2.1. Software architecture The PICTURE-BASIS software consists in three parts: (a) A data management software package, called BASIS [5] which supports a wide range of biblio- graphic, full text and numeric databases. BAsis has also been developped by the Battelle Institute, and is installed at about 180 sites worldwide, of which 40 in Europe. BASIS is especially cost-effective in 0167-8655/86/$3.50 c 1986, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland) 477