The research in content-based indexing and retrieval of visual information such as images and video has become one of the most populated directions in the vast area of information technologies. Social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, FileMobile, and DailyMotion host and supply facilities for accessing a tremendous amount of professional and user generated data. The areas of societal activity, such as, video protection and security, also generate thousands and thousands of terabytes of visual content. This book presents the most recent results and important trends in visual information indexing and retrieval. It is intended for young researchers, as well as, professionals looking for an algorithmic solution to a problem.

Visual information retrieval (VIR) is an active and vibrant research area, which attempts at providing means for organizing, indexing, annotating, and retrieving visual information (images and videos) from large, unstructured repositories. The goal of VIR is to retrieve matches ranked by their relevance to a given query, which is often expressed as an example image and/or a series of keywords. During its early years (1995-2000), the research efforts were dominated by content-based approaches contributed primarily by the image and video processing community. During the past decade, it was widely recognized that the challenges imposed by the lack of coincidence between an image's visual contents and its semantic interpretation, also known as semantic gap, required a clever use of textual metadata (in addition to information extracted from the image's pixel contents) to make image and video retrieval solutions efficient and effective. The need to bridge (or at least narrow) the semantic gap has been one of the driving forces behind current VIR research. Additionally, other related research problems and market opportunities have started to emerge, offering a broad range of exciting problems for computer scientists and engineers to work on. In this introductory book, we focus on a subset of VIR problems where the media consists of images, and the indexing and retrieval methods are based on the pixel contents of those images -- an approach known as content-based image retrieval (CBIR). We present an implementation-oriented overview of CBIR concepts, techniques, algorithms, and figures of merit. Most chapters are supported by examples written in Java, using Lucene (an open-source Java-based indexing and search implementation) and LIRE (Lucene Image REtrieval), an open-source Java-based library for CBIR. Table of Contents: Introduction / Information Retrieval: Selected Concepts and Techniques / Visual Features / Indexing Visual Features / LIRE: An Extensible Java CBIR Library / Concluding Remarks

This text introduces the basic concepts and techniques in VIR. In doing so, it develops a foundation for further research and study. Divided into two parts, the first part describes the fundamental principles. A chapter is devoted to each of the main features of VIR, such as colour, texture and shape-based search. There is coverage of search techniques for time-based image sequences or videos, and an overview of how to combine all the basic features described and integrate them into the search process. The second part looks at advanced topics such as multimedia query. This book is essential reading for researchers in VIR, and final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses such as Multimedia Information Retrieval, Multimedia Databases, and others.

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.

What is Content Based Image Retrieval Content-based image retrieval, also known as query by image content and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR), is the application of computer vision techniques to the problem of image retrieval, which is the difficulty of searching for digital images in big databases. Other names for this technique include content-based visual information retriev. In contrast to the conventional concept-based methods, content-based picture retrieval is a more recent development. How you will benefit (I) Insights, and validations about the following topics: Chapter 1: Content-based image retrieval Chapter 2: Information retrieval Chapter 3: Image retrieval Chapter 4: Automatic image annotation Chapter 5: Tag cloud Chapter 6: Video search engine Chapter 7: Image organizer Chapter 8: Image meta search Chapter 9: Reverse image search Chapter 10: Visual search engine (II) Answering the public top questions about content based image retrieval. (III) Real world examples for the usage of content based image retrieval in many fields. Who this book is for Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of Content Based Image Retrieval.

In this paper, we review 300 references on video retrieval, indicating when text-only solutions are unsatisfactory and showing the promising alternatives which are in majority concept-based. Therefore, central to our discussion is the notion of a semantic concept: an objective linguistic description of an observable entity. Specifically, we present our view on how its automated detection, selection under uncertainty, and interactive usage might solve the major scientific problem for video retrieval: the semantic gap. To bridge the gap, we lay down the anatomy of a concept-based video search engine. We present a component-wise decomposition of such an interdisciplinary multimedia system, covering influences from information retrieval, computer vision, machine learning, and human-computer interaction. For each of the components we review state-of-the-art solutions in the literature, each having different characteristics and merits. Because of these differences, we cannot understand the progress in video retrieval without serious evaluation efforts such as carried out in the NIST TRECVID benchmark. We discuss its data, tasks, results, and the many derived community initiatives in creating annotations and baselines for repeatable experiments. We conclude with our perspective on future challenges and opportunities.