Visual information retrieval (VIR) is a research area with more than 300 scientific publications every year. Technological progress lets surveys become out of date within a short duration. This paper intends to shortly describe selected important advances in VIR in recent years and point out promising directions for future research. A software architecture for visual media handling is proposed that allows handling image and video content equally. This allows to integrate both types of media in a singe system. The major advances in feature design are sketched and new methods for semantic enrichment are proposed. Guidelines are formulated for further development of feature extraction methods. The most relevant retrieval processes are described and an interactive method for visual mining is suggested that really puts "the human in the loop". For evaluation, the classic recall- and precision-based approach is discussed as well as a new procedure based on MPEG-7 and statistical data analysis. Finally, an "ideal" architecture for VIR systems is outlined. The selection of VIR topics is subjective and represents the author's point of view. The intention is to provide a short but substantial introduction to the field of VIR.

Date Published: 18 December 2003
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 5307, Storage and Retrieval Methods and Applications for Multimedia 2004, (18 December 2003); doi: 10.1117/12.525071

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5307:
Storage and Retrieval Methods and Applications for Multimedia 2004
Minerva M. Yeung; Rainer W. Lienhart; Chung-Sheng Li, Editor(s)