 Corresponding author. Journal of Visual L anguages and Computing (1998) 9, 103—117 REGULAR ARTICLE A Multidimensional Image Browser L. C INQUE, * S. LEVIALDI, * A. M ALIZIA AND K. A. OLSEN *Pictorial Computing L aboratory, Dip. Scienze dell’Informazione, Universita’ di Roma, Via Salaria 113, 001895 Roma, Italy, Cinque.dsi.uniroma1.it, levialdi @dsi.uniroma1.it Molde College, Britv. 2, N-6400 Molde, Norway, k ai.olsen @himolde.no Submitted 8 October 1996; accepted 5 November 1997 We present a browsing tool for content-based image retrieval. Images are retrieved from the database based on both textual and geometrical attributes. The resulting image collection is presented in a user-defined multidimensional visual information space, which acts as an interface to the underlying image database.  1998 Academic Press Limited Keywords: browsing, content-based image retrieval, visualization 1. Introduction THE ADVANCE of pictorial databases, collections of photos, clip art files, etc., makes it interesting to consider retrieval tools that work directly on the images. Such tools could be used instead of, or in combination with, traditional text retrieval tools working on image annotations. One such tool is model-based vision. Here knowledge about the object structures is utilized in the recognition process. The process consists of two tasks. First, a structural description of the visual query, for example a sketch, is provided bythe user. This description is then used in the second part, matching the description to images in the database. To make the matching more efficient, structural descriptions of all the database images will usually be created in a preprocessing phase. That is, in order to formalize the process of image searching, we perform the process on a level where both queries and database contents may be formalized. As an example, we consider the user that requires a picture of an airplane, seen in the air. An example of what the user needs is shown in Figure 1. Sucharequest to the database maybe formalized by searching for the keyword ‘airplane’ in a caption or picture annotation record, perhaps trying to combine this with other words such as ‘in the air’ or ‘flying’. However, the annotation may be lacking, the keywords provided by the user may not be present in the annotation, or the user may not be able to provide appropriate keywords. As an alternative, or in combination to text-based retrieval, the user may try to search directly on the image geometrical attributes. By using the 1045-926X/ 98/ 010103 # 15 $25.00/ 0/ vl970066  1998 Academic Press Limited