Content-Based Image And Video Retrieval addresses the basic concepts and techniques for designing content-based image and video retrieval systems. It also discusses a variety of design choices for the key components of these systems. This book gives a comprehensive survey of the content-based image retrieval systems, including several content-based video retrieval systems. The survey includes both research and commercial content-based retrieval systems. Content-Based Image And Video Retrieval includes pointers to two hundred representative bibliographic references on this field, ranging from survey papers to descriptions of recent work in the area, entire books and more than seventy websites. Finally, the book presents a detailed case study of designing MUSE–a content-based image retrieval system developed at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.

Images and video play a crucial role in visual information systems and multimedia. There is an extraordinary number of applications of such systems in entertainment, business, art, engineering, and science. Such applications often involved large image and video collections, and therefore, searching for images and video in large collections is becoming an important operation. Because of the size of such databases, efficiency is crucial. We strongly believe that image and video retrieval need an integrated approach from fields such as image processing, shape processing, perception, database indexing, visualization, and querying, etc. This book contains a selection of results that was presented at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval, in December 1999. The purpose of this seminar was to bring together people from the various fields, in order to promote information exchange and interaction among researchers who are interested in various aspects of accessing the content of image and video data. The book provides an overview of the state of the art in content-based image and video retrieval. The topics covered by the chapters are integrated system aspects, as well as techniques from image processing, computer vision, multimedia, databases, graphics, signal processing, and information theory. The book will be of interest to researchers and professionals in the fields of multimedia, visual information (database) systems, computer vision, and information retrieval.

Welcome to the 2nd International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval, CIVR2003. The goal of CIVR is to illuminate the state of the art in visual information retrieval and to stimulate collaboration between researchers and practitioners. This year we received 110 submissions from 26 countries. Based upon the reviews of at least 3 members of the program committee, 43 papers were accepted for the research track of the conference. First, we would like to thank all of the members of the Program Committee and the additional referees listed below. Their reviews of the submissions played a pivotal role in the quality of the conference. Moreover,we are grateful to Nicu Sebe and Xiang Zhou for helping to organize the review process; Shih-Fu Chang and Alberto del Bimbo for setting up the practitioner track; and Erwin Bakker for editing the proceedings and designing the conference poster. Special thanks go to our keynote and plenary speakers, Nevenka Dimitrova fromPhilipsResearch,RameshJainfromGeorgiaTech,ChrisPorterfromGetty Images,andAlanSmeatonfromDublinCityUniversity.Furthermore,wewishto acknowledge our sponsors, the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,TsingHuaUniversity,theInstitutionofElectricalEngineers (IEE),PhilipsResearch,andtheLeidenInstituteofAdvancedComputerScience at Leiden University. Finally, we would like to express our thanks to severalpeople who performed important work related to the organization of the conference: Jennifer Quirk and Catherine Zech for the localorganizationat the BeckmanInstitute; Richard Harvey for his help with promotional activity and sponsorship for CIVR2003; andtotheorganizingcommitteeofthe?rstCIVRforsettinguptheinternational mission and structure of the conference.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval, CIVR 2004, held in Dublin, Ireland in July 2004. The 31 revised full papers and 44 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image annotation and user searching, image and video retrieval algorithms, person and event identification for retrieval, content-based image and video retrieval, and user perspectives.

It was our great pleasure to host the 4th International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR) at the National University of Singapore on 20–22 July 2005. CIVR aims to provide an international forum for the discussion of research challenges and exchange of ideas among researchers and practitioners in image/video retrieval technologies. It addresses innovative research in the broad ?eld of image and video retrieval. A unique feature of this conference is the high level of participation by researchers from both academia and industry. Another unique feature of CIVR this year was in its format – it o?ered both the traditional oral presentation sessions, as well as the short presentation cum poster sessions. The latter provided an informal alternative forum for animated discussions and exchanges of ideas among the participants. We are pleased to note that interest in CIVR has grown over the years. The number of submissions has steadily increased from 82 in 2002, to 119 in 2003, and 125 in 2004. This year, we received 128 submissions from the international communities:with81(63.3%)fromAsiaandAustralia,25(19.5%)fromEurope, and 22 (17.2%) from North America. After a rigorous review process, 20 papers were accepted for oral presentations, and 42 papers were accepted for poster presentations. In addition to the accepted submitted papers, the program also included 4 invited papers, 1 keynote industrial paper, and 4 invited industrial papers. Altogether, we o?ered a diverse and interesting program, addressing the current interests and future trends in this area.

The area of content-based video retrieval is a very hot area both for research and for commercial applications. In order to design effective video databases for applications such as digital libraries, video production, and a variety of Internet applications, there is a great need to develop effective techniques for content-based video retrieval. One of the main issues in this area of research is how to bridge the semantic gap between low-Ievel features extracted from a video (such as color, texture, shape, motion, and others) and semantics that describe video concept on a higher level. In this book, Dr. Milan Petkovi6 and Prof. Dr. Willem Jonker have addressed this issue by developing and describing several innovative techniques to bridge the semantic gap. The main contribution of their research, which is the core of the book, is the development of three techniques for bridging the semantic gap: (1) a technique that uses the spatio-temporal extension of the Cobra framework, (2) a technique based on hidden Markov models, and (3) a technique based on Bayesian belief networks. To evaluate performance of these techniques, the authors have conducted a number of experiments using real video data. The book also discusses domains solutions versus general solution of the problem. Petkovi6 and Jonker proposed a solution that allows a system to be applied in multiple domains with minimal adjustments. They also designed and described a prototype video database management system, which is based on techniques they proposed in the book.

Business intelligence has always been considered an essential ingredient for success. However, it is not until recently that the technology has enabled organizations to generate and deploy intelligence for global competition. These technologies can be leveraged to create the intelligent enterprises of the 21st century that will not only provide excellent and customized services to their customers, but will also create business efficiency for building relationships with suppliers and other business partners on a long term basis. Creating such intelligent enterprises requires the understanding and integration of diverse enterprise components into cohesive intelligent systems. Anticipating that future enterprises need to become intelligent, Intelligent Enterprises of the 21st Century brings together the experiences and knowledge from many parts of the world to provide a compendium of high quality theoretical and applied concepts, methodologies, and techniques that help diffuse knowledge and skills required to create and manage intelligent enterprises of the 21st century for gaining sustainable competitive advantage in a global environment. This book is a comprehensive compilation of the state of the art vision and thought processes needed to design and manage globally competitive business organizations.