With the rapid development of internet technology, the number of internet users and the amount of multimedia information on the internet is ever increasing. Recently, the web sites, such as e-business sites and shopping mall sites, deal with lots of image information. As a result, it is required to support content-based image retrieval efficiently on such image data. This paper proposes an intelligent image retrieval system, which adopts XML technology. To support object-based content retrieval on product catalog images containing multiple objects, we describe a multi-level metadata. structures represeningt the local features, global features, and semantics of image data. To enable semantic-based and content-based retrieval on such image data, we design a XML-Schema for the proposed metadata. We also describe how to automatically transform the retrieval results into the forms suitable for the various user environments, such as web browser or mobile browser, using XSLT. The proposed scheme can be utilized to enable efficient image metadata sharing between systems, and it will contribute in improving the retrieval correctness and the user's satisfaction on content-based e-catalog image retrieval.
