| 摘要 |
PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To efficiently retrieve and display a target image by retrieving images similar to the object image to be retrieved from a database having a directory structure. SOLUTION: A personal computer 10 and a film scanner 30 are connected to a server 20 with large storage capacity through a network N and the image database is structured on the server 20. To retrieve a specific image from the database, multiple images, e.g. images in the image database are statistically classified into the determined number of clusters and images representing the respective clusters are displayed on the screen on the personal computer 10. The relative distances in feature quantity between an image selected out of them and other images are found to calculate similarities. The similarities are set larger and larger as the distances are shorter and shorter, and an image which is registered more recently is retrieved with higher priority. Thumbnail images are displayed in the decreasing order of the similarities. Consequently, the user can obtain a desirable image faster.
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