INFORMATION PROCESSING APPARATUS CAPABLE OF AUTOMATICALLY SETTING DEGREE OF RELEVANCE BETWEEN KEYWORDS ,KEYWORD ATTACHING METHOD AND KEYWORD AUTO-ATTACHING APPARATUS

A retrieval apparatus allows keywords to be attached simply and automatically. A feature quantity extractor 15 extracts feature quantities of a registration-target image to obtain a p-dimensional feature vector. A vector converter 16 multiplies the p-dimensional feature vector with a canonical correlation coefficient matrix A2 so as to convert the feature vector into a k-dimensional feature composite variable vector, thus making a scale change. A keyword auto-setting processor 14 obtains q neighboring images based on distances between the feature composite variable vector of the registration-target image and coordinate composite variable vectors of r pre-registered images stored in a vector conversion coefficient storage 10. Then, based on distances between positions of the resulting q neighboring images on the image space and positions of the pre-registered keywords on the keyword space, h neighboring keywords are obtained for each of the neighboring images. Thus, q×h keywords suitably attached to the registration-target image are automatically set with simplicity.