Combining semantics and visual content for museum information retrieval

Abstract

Searching useful information from huge and unstructured museum multimedia data has been a difficult problem in information retrieval. In this paper, we propose the design of an image retrieval system that combines two important modalities- text and image – along with ontological concepts for retrieving digitized museum artifacts. The combination of text and domain ontology facilitates retrieval based on semantics. The evaluation of the proposed method has been done on a dataset comprising of 1200 images of artifacts displayed in various galleries of Allahabad museum and their textual descriptions. A domain ontology has been manually constructed and used as a source of knowledge to aid in the retrieval and browsing. The organization of the artifacts in the museum has been used to arrange domain concepts in a hierarchy.