Abstract

In this study, aesthetic impressions were used for a high-level feature of image retrieval. The term, “aesthetic" has been studied in psychology, art, and literature. It means unconscious, instantaneous parts of visual perception and emotion. The literatures related to aesthetic impressions were reviewed and four kinds of aesthetic impressions were defined operationally: strong impression, soft impression, courteous impression, and refined impression. 66 image files of paintings were sampled randomly from 1100 paintings and low-level color features were extracted from them by a using perceptual color model(Lai, & Tait, 1998). The high-level features of an image, that is, four kinds of aesthetic impressions of each painting were measured by 4 subjects and averaged. In CBIR, 2 subjects performed image retrievals using example queries. They were asked to retrieve images by using the aesthetic impressions or the keywords. In evaluations, subjects showed that they were satisfied with the aesthetic impression-based image retrieval system on the average. And R-precision of the image retrieval with both color features and aesthetic impressions was higher than that of the image retrieval with color features only. But further studies with larger test collections and query sets should be followed for generalization of the result of this study.