The World Wide Web and the Internet are signs that things will be very different in the future. And what is so striking about this computer-age future is that it comes incredibly fast and is incredibly overwhelming. Anyone who has surfed the Web has exclaimed at one point or another that there is so much information available, so much to search and so much to keep up with.Where Lycos and AltaVista are already accepted tools for textual information, image and multimedia search engines are the natural answers in the quest for pictorial information. This book provides a state-of-the-art description of that field. It contains the proceedings of a valuable workshop in Amsterdam, where people gathered to discuss the progress in the field. The topics cover computational methods of searching for pictures, the powerful pictorial clues in the recognition of objects, storage and indexing of objects in a database, and, ways to access the requested pictorial information.

Searching Multimedia Databases by Content bridges the gap between the database and signal processing communities by providing the necessary background information for the reader and presenting it along with the intuition and mechanics of the best existing tools in each area. The first half of Searching Multimedia Databases by Content reviews the most successful database access methods, in increasing complexity, reaching up to spatial access methods and text retrieval. In all cases, the emphasis is on practical approaches that have been incorporated in commercial systems, or that seem very promising. The second half of the book uses the above access methods to achieve fast searching in a database of signals. A general methodology is presented, which suggests extracting a few good features from each multimedia object, thus mapping objects into points in a metric space. Finally, the book concludes by presenting some recent successful applications of the methodology on time series and color images. Searching Multimedia Databases by Content is targeted towards researchers and developers of multimedia systems. The book can also serve as a textbook for a graduate course on multimedia searching, covering both access methods as well as the basics of signal processing.

The explosive growth of multimedia data transmission has generated a critical need for efficient, high-capacity image databases, as well as powerful search engines to retrieve image data from them. This book brings together contributions by an international all-star team of innovators in the field who share their insights into all key aspects of image database and search engine construction. Readers get in-depth discussions of the entire range of crucial image database architecture, indexing and retrieval, transmission, display, and user interface issues. And, using examples from an array of disciplines, the authors present cutting-edge applications in medical imagery, multimedia communications, earth science, remote sensing, and other major application areas.

A new approach to image databases, the work is divided into four central parts: introduction to the problems that image database research must solve; computer vision and information retrieval techniques; image database issues; and interface and engines for visual searches. Example: Imagine the difficulty of building and using a database for "face recognition," where an image of a face is used. In order to effectively use the image a huge number of characteristics would need to be entered in the database. The goal of future image databases is to use hardware and software to recognize and categorize images without typing in characteristics. * Comprehensive coverage of the image analysis as well as the database/theoretical aspects of image databases. * Extensive coverage of interfaces and interaction models, with a theoretical framework for the development of new interaction schemes.-

The explosion of computer use and internet communication has placed new emphasis on the ability to store, retrieve and search for all types of images, both still photo and video images. The success and the future of visual information retrieval depends on the cutting edge research and applications explored in this book. It combines the expertise from both computer vision and database research.Unlike text retrieval and text/numeric databases the challenges of image databases are enormous. How do you use "data mining" to search for an image if you do not have "key words" to search? Exploratory Image Databases introduces the idea that it is possible to solve this problem by merging database systems into a single search and browse activity called "exploration."Exploratory Image Databases is one of the first single-author books that unifies the critical emerging topic of image databases. A new approach to image databases, the work is divided into four central parts: introduction to the problems that image database research must solve; computer vision and information retrieval techniques; image database issues; and interface and engines for visual searches.Example: Imagine the difficulty of building and using a database for "face recognition," where an image of a face is used. In order to effectively use the image a huge number of characteristics would need to be entered in the database. The goal of future image databases is to use hardware and software to recognize and categorize images without typing in characteristics. * Comprehensive coverage of the image analysis as well as the database/theoretical aspects of image databases. * Extensive coverage of interfaces and interaction models, with a theoretical framework for the development of new interaction schemes. * Identifies three interaction models between users and image databases, two of which have no counterpart in traditional databases. * Coverage of the relation between image and text, including mixed search models and the automatic determination of the relation between images and text on large corpuses like the web. * Analysis of the process of signification in images and its influence on the interaction models and technological problems of image databases.

With the rapid growth in the use of computers to manipulate, process, and reason about multimedia data, the problem of how to store and retrieve such data is becoming increasingly important. Thus, although the field of multimedia database systems is only about 5 years old, it is rapidly becoming a focus for much excitement and research effort. Multimedia database systems are intended to provide unified frameworks for requesting and integrating information in a wide variety of formats, such as audio and video data, document data, and image data. Such data often have special storage requirements that are closely coupled to the various kinds of devices that are used for recording and presenting the data, and for each form of data there are often multiple representations and multiple standards - all of which make the database integration task quite complex. Some of the problems include: - what a multimedia database query means - what kinds of languages to use for posing queries - how to develop compilers for such languages - how to develop indexing structures for storing media on ancillary devices - data compression techniques - how to present and author presentations based on user queries. Although approaches are being developed for a number of these problems, they have often been ad hoc in nature, and there is a need to provide a princi pled theoretical foundation.

A general concept for the representation of multimedia data by unformatted and formatted data is introduced. It leads to a basic-function approach to the design and development of multimedia database systems, which extends a relational database management system with new attribute types. In this paper, raster (or bitmap) images are used as an example. The structure of image values is defined, and a basic set of operations for access and manipulation is proposed. These operations can be integrated into a query language like SQL. To facilitate a contents-oriented search on multimedia data in general and on images in particular, text descriptions are introduced into the database that allow users to indicate the contents of an image. The well established techniques of information retrieval can be applied to search for these descriptions. The proposed system allows us to model images that are assigned to objects as well as stand-alone images. The paper finally sketches a prototype implementation on top of an existing relational database management system (Ingres). Keywords: Multimedia databases, Image databases, Theses. (mjm).