1. An interactive system for increasing retrieval performance of images depicting text by allowing users to provide relevance feedback on words contained in the images, the system comprising: a processor; one or more persistent storage devices, wherein at least one persistent storage device is coupled to the processor for storing a program of instructions, wherein the program of instructions are executed by the processor to perform a function to implement the system, the function comprising the steps of: receiving a query input comprising one or more query terms from a user through the user interface to locate one or more images included in the one or more persistent storage devices; determining one or more text suggestions related to the one or more query terms, wherein the one or more text suggestions comprise terms that have been identified as being included in the one or more images; retrieving one or more word images from the one or more images related to the one or more text suggestions, wherein each word image is a graphical rendering of a portion of the one or more images that shows a word; creating one or more word image groups from the retrieved word images using one or more similarity measures; wherein the one or more similarity measures includes a location similarity measure, wherein two word images are similar when their bounding box positions within their different corresponding images overlap by more than a given threshold; determining at least one representative word image for each word image group; displaying the representative word image for each word image group to the user via the user interface; and receiving a selection of one or more of the displayed representative word images from the user via the user interface.
1. An interactive system for increasing retrieval performance of images depicting text by allowing users to provide relevance feedback on words contained in the images, the system comprising: a processor; one or more persistent storage devices, wherein at least one persistent storage device is coupled to the processor for storing a program of instructions, wherein the program of instructions are executed by the processor to perform a function to implement the system, the function comprising the steps of: receiving a query input comprising one or more query terms from a user through the user interface to locate one or more images included in the one or more persistent storage devices; determining one or more text suggestions related to the one or more query terms, wherein the one or more text suggestions comprise terms that have been identified as being included in the one or more images; retrieving one or more word images from the one or more images related to the one or more text suggestions, wherein each word image is a graphical rendering of a portion of the one or more images that shows a word; creating one or more word image groups from the retrieved word images using one or more similarity measures; wherein the one or more similarity measures includes a location similarity measure, wherein two word images are similar when their bounding box positions within their different corresponding images overlap by more than a given threshold; determining at least one representative word image for each word image group; displaying the representative word image for each word image group to the user via the user interface; and receiving a selection of one or more of the displayed representative word images from the user via the user interface. 9. The system of claim 1 , wherein information regarding query terms, associated user-excluded word image suggestions and associated user-included word image suggestions are saved to the system.