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.