Toward a visual thesaurus

  • Authors:
  • Rosalind W. Picard

  • Affiliations:
  • MIT Media Laboratory, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • MIRO'95 Proceedings of the Final conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

A thesaurus is a book containing related words, such as synonyms, in a given language; it provides similarity links when trying to retrieve articles or stories about a particular topic. A "visual thesaurus" works with pictures, not words. It aids in recognizing visually similar events, "visual synonyms," including both spatial and motion similarity. This paper describes a method for building such a tool, and recent research results in the MIT Media Lab which contribute toward this goal. The heart of the method is a learning system which gathers information by interacting with a user of a database. The learning system is also capable of incorporating audio and other perceptual information, ultimately constructing a representation of common sense knowledge.