Multimedia information retrieval is performed using meta-descriptors in addition to descriptors. A “descriptor” is a representation of a feature, a “feature” being a distinctive characteristic of
multimedia information, while a “meta-descriptor” is information about the descriptor. Meta-descriptors are generated for
multimedia information in a repository (10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24) by extracting the descriptors from the
multimedia information (111), clustering the
multimedia information based on the descriptors (112), assigning meta-descriptors to each cluster (113), and attaching the meta-descriptors to the
multimedia information in the repository (114). The multimedia repository is queried by formulating a query using query-by-example (131), acquiring the descriptor / s and meta-descriptor / s for a repository multimedia item (132), generating a query descriptor / s if none of the same type has been previously generated (133, 134), comparing the descriptors of the repository multimedia item and the query multimedia item (135), and
ranking and displaying the results (136, 137).