Indexing of images by pictorial information

This paper presents the architecture of a system that retrieves images on the basis of pictorial information as opposed to systems based on textual and numerical retrieval. The pictorial approach is motivated from the observation that the majority of the pictorial information in an image cannot be fully described by textual or numerical information due to its essential limitations in expressive power. Therefore, we propose that the search is carried out from a pictorial specification (i.e. a set of pictorial details and their relationships) where the correspondence is established between the pictorial specification and the images in the database. The method is based on fuzzy Mathematical Morphology operations. In this paper we concentrate on MRI images of the chest. Experiments have been carried out on a database of those images show encouraging results especially when realizing that the content of medical images is a weakly formalizable domain.