Web Image Clustering

While image clustering has many important applications ranging from personal to web image management, its use is often limited by the difficulty of extracting reliable semantics from low level image features. The image clusters can be improved by using features extracted from image regions rather than the whole image. Region segmentation can be improved in turn, by considering all images within the same cluster rather than segmenting each image independently. This observation leads to the unified Bayesian framework for image clustering and segmentation presented in this paper. The experimental results, reported using several types of visual feature extractors on a database of web documents containing over 6000 images, illustrates a significant improvement over existing techniques.