Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems have been actively investigated over the past decade. Several existing CBIR prototypes claim to be designed based on perceptual characteristics of the human visual system, but even those who do are far from recognizing that they could benefit further by incorporating ongoing research in vision science. This paper explores the inclusion of human visual perception knowledge into the design and implementation of CBIR systems. Particularly, it addresses the latest developments in computational modeling of human visual attention. This fresh way of revisiting concepts in CBIR based on the latest findings and open questions in vision science research has the potential to overcome some of the challenges faced by CBIR systems

This demonstration highlights the benefits that image retrieval systems can enjoy by use of a thoughtful interface. We present a live demonstration of PRISM, a new Web-based application that, through a simple set of natural actions, allows the user the ability to elicit sophisticated responses from easily-formed queries. Additionally, the system was designed with not only content-based, but also content-free image retrieval and semantic annotation in mind. The demonstration system uses an attention-based method for extracting and determining the relevance of salient regions of interest in an unsupervised way, but can be adapted to a variety of implementations

We have developed a biologically-motivated, unsupervised way of grouping together images whose salient regions of interest (ROIs) are perceptually similar regardless of the visual contents of other (less relevant) parts of the image. In the implemented model cluster membership is assigned based on feature vectors extracted from salient ROIs. This paper focuses on the experimental evaluation of the proposed approach for several combinations of feature extraction techniques and unsupervised clustering algorithms. The results reported here show that this is a valid approach and encourage further research.