Semantic text-based image retrieval with multi-modality ontology and DBpedia

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to reduce the semantic distance by proposing a model for integrating indexes of textual and visual features via a multi-modality ontology and the use of DBpedia to improve the comprehensiveness of the ontology to enhance semantic retrieval.

Design/methodology/approach

A multi-modality ontology-based approach was developed to integrate high-level concepts and low-level features, as well as integrate the ontology base with DBpedia to enrich the knowledge resource. A complete ontology model was also developed to represent the domain of sport news, with image caption keywords and image features. Precision and recall were used as metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the multi-modality approach, and the outputs were compared with those obtained using a single-modality approach (i.e. textual ontology and visual ontology).

Findings

The results based on ten queries show a superior performance of the multi-modality ontology-based IMR system integrated with DBpedia in retrieving correct images in accordance with user queries. The system achieved 100 per cent precision for six of the queries and greater than 80 per cent precision for the other four queries. The text-based system only achieved 100 per cent precision for one query; all other queries yielded precision rates less than 0.500.

Research limitations/implications

This study only focused on BBC Sport News collection in the year 2009.

Practical implications

The paper includes implications for the development of ontology-based retrieval on image collection.

Originality value

This study demonstrates the strength of using a multi-modality ontology integrated with DBpedia for image retrieval to overcome the deficiencies of text-based and ontology-based systems. The result validates semantic text-based with multi-modality ontology and DBpedia as a useful model to reduce the semantic distance.

Citation

M.K., Y.I.A. and Mohd Noah, S.A. (2017), "Semantic text-based image retrieval with multi-modality ontology and DBpedia", The Electronic Library, Vol. 35 No. 6, pp. 1191-1214. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-06-2016-0127