Querying by photographs: using virtual reality for content-based image retrieval

The success of the 'query by example' paradigm for content based retrieval has lowered the interest of the research community in the development of new interaction paradigms. Nevertheless, in many contexts this can be inadequate, due to the difficulty for many users to paint significant examples and the impossibility-in many cases-of reproducing complex scenes. 3D interfaces and virtual reality based interaction paradigms offer new possibilities to overcome these limitations. In the prototype system presented, a virtual world can be interactively customized by adding objects to a predefined scene and editing object properties in terms of colours and textures. The system allows the user to navigate the 3D scene. While navigating the virtual world, the user is given the opportunity of taking some photographs used to query by content a database of images.