本文研究面向语义检索的图像内容描述机制。首先提出图像语义检索整体框架，系统采用XML技术，将图像内容层式描述、图像语义对象自动获取、图像语义相似测度等功能模块加以融合，实现语义层面的图像检索。重点对系统框架中与图像内容描述相关的图像特征分层描述模型、空间位置算子定义、语义对象操作等关键技术进行讨论，并定义相应的XML语义描述框架。检索实验结果表明，该方法具有较好的语义检索性能。

In this paper we firstly present an XML-driven image semantic retrieval system, which consists of several functional modules, i.e. image content hierarchy modeling, semantic object automatic extraction, and semantic similarity measure. Secondly, the paper concentrates on the image character description model, and we discuss the definitions and operators of image object. Then some related XML semantic descriptors are defined to represent the image content. Experiment results on traffic images show good retrieval quality.