Multi-modal browsing of images in Web documents

In this paper, we describe a system for performing browsing and retrieval on a collection of web images and associated text on an HTML page. Browsing is combined with retrieval to help a user locate interesting portions of the corpus, without the need to formulate a query well matched to the corpus. Multi-modal information, in the form of text surrounding an image and some simple image features, is used in this process. Using the system, a user progressively narrows a collection to a small number of elements of interest, similar to the Scatter/Gather system(1) developed for text browsing. We have extended the Scatter/Gather method to use multi-modal features. With the use of multiple features, some collection elements may have unknown or undefined values for some features; we present a method for incorporating these elements into the result set. This method also provides a way to handle the case when a search is narrowed to a part of the space near a boundary between two clusters. A number of examples illustrating our system are provided.