Translating Journalists' Requirements into Features for Image Search

This paper illustrates how taking advantage of user studies highlighting the user requirements can lead to the selection of suitable visual features in image search systems. The results of a study to identify pertinent visual features to enhance a text-based press photo search system used by journalists are presented. A requirement was that the visual features should be intuitively understandable by the journalists. This feature selection task is approached by first determining the journalists' photo searching requirements based on a published user study. These requirements are then mapped to suitable visual features. The emphasis was on identifying suitable and intuitive low-level features, as these can be rapidly implemented in the existing text-based image search system. Results demonstrating the use of the selected features are shown.