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Preface


This preface contains the following sections:

What is QBIC?

Query By Image Content (QBIC) is a technology that allows you to query collections of images by their content. "Query by content" means that you can query a collection of images in order to locate images that are similar to the query image, where similarity can be based on color, texture, or other image properties. For example, you can search for images that have predominantly red colors or striped textures, where the color and texture information is automatically computed. Queries by content complement traditional queries that use image file names or keyword descriptions.

QBIC does not provide semantic analysis, meaning for example, QBIC cannot locate your "favorite images," such as those that contain pictures of your cats, dogs, or other objects that require semantic understanding.

QBIC technology has been incorporated into some IBM software products, such as DB2 Image Extender and Digital Library.

This manual describes a set of C++ classes and software routines that implement QBIC technology. These routines were used to implement QBIC technology in the previously noted IBM products. If you want to know more about the technical details of QBIC, see the papers have we published and the references therein. The following are two recent papers:

Intended Audience

This guide is intended for programmers who want to incorporate QBIC functionality into their applications and incorporate their own feature extraction capabilities into QBIC in order to extend QBIC functionality. It is assumed that users have a working knowledge of the C++ programming language.

Summary of Contents

This manual contains the following chapters and appendices:

Technical Support

For more information about QBIC, visit our web site at
http://wwwqbic.almaden.ibm.com.

For technical information, contact:

IBM Corporation
Almaden Research Center
650 Harry Road
San Jose, CA 95120

Computer Science Department
attn: Mr. Xiaoming Zhu

408-927-1427

xzhu@almaden.ibm.com

Licensing Information

For licensing information, contact:

IBM Corporation
Almaden Research Center
650 Harry Road
San Jose, CA 95120

Business Development
attn: Mr.Ted Loewenberg

408-927-1202

tedl@almaden.ibm.com




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xzhu@almaden.ibm.com or tedl@almaden.ibm.com
Copyright © 1998, IBM Corporation. All rights reserved.