Integrating textual and visual information for cross-language image retrieval: A trans-media dictionary approach

This paper explores the integration of textual and visual information for cross-language image retrieval. An approach which automatically transforms textual queries into visual representations is proposed. First, we mine the relationships between text and images and employ the mined relationships to construct visual queries from textual ones. Then, the retrieval results of textual and visual queries are combined. To evaluate the proposed approach, we conduct English monolingual and Chinese–English cross-language retrieval experiments. The selection of suitable textual query terms to construct visual queries is the major issue. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves retrieval performance, and use of nouns is appropriate to generate visual queries.