Image Databases

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.

Medical Image Databases covers the new technologies of biomedical imaging databases and their applications in clinical services, education, and research. Authors were selected because they are doing cutting-edge basic or technology work in relevant areas. This was done to infuse each chapter with ideas from people actively investigating and developing medical image databases rather than simply review the existing literature. The authors have analyzed the literature and have expanded on their own research. They have also addressed several common threads within their generic topics. These include system architecture, standards, information retrieval, data modeling, image visualizations, query languages, telematics, data mining, and decision supports. The new ideas and results reported in this volume suggest new and better ways to develop imaging databases and possibly lead us to the next information infrastructure in biomedicine. Medical Image Databases is suitable as a textbook for a graduate-level course on biomedical imaging or medical image databases, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

Intelligent Image Databases: Towards Advanced Image Retrieval addresses the image feature selection issue in developing content-based image retrieval systems. The book first discusses the four important issues in developing a complete content-based image retrieval system, and then demonstrates that image feature selection has significant impact on the remaining issues of system design. Next, it presents an in-depth literature survey on typical image features explored by contemporary content-based image retrieval systems for image matching and retrieval purposes. The goal of the survey is to determine the characteristics and the effectiveness of individual features, so as to establish guidelines for future development of content-based image retrieval systems. Intelligent Image Databases: Towards Advanced Image Retrieval describes the Advanced Region-Based Image Retrieval System (ARBIRS) developed by the authors for color images of real-world scenes. They have selected image regions for building ARBIRS as the literature survey suggests that prominent image regions, along with their associated features, provide a higher probability for achieving a higher level content-based image retrieval system. A major challenge in building a region-based image retrieval system is that prominent regions are rather difficult to capture in an accurate and error-free condition, particularly those in images of real-world scenes. To meet this challenge, the book proposes an integrated approach to tackle the problem via feature capturing, feature indexing, and database query. Through comprehensive system evaluation, it is demonstrated how these systematically integrated efforts work effectively to accomplish advanced image retrieval. Intelligent Image Databases: Towards Advanced Image Retrieval serves as an excellent reference and may be used as a text for advanced courses on the topic.

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. Contents:Multi-media Search: An Authoring Perspective (S W Smoliar et al.)Painting Retrieval Based on Color Semantics (J M Corridoni et al.)Efficient and Robust Retrieval by Shape Content Through Curvature Scale Space (F Mokhtarian et al.)Handling Multiple Instances of Symbols in Pictorial Queries by Image Similarity (A Soffer & H Samet)A New Method for Key Frame Based Video Content Representation (A Hanjalic et al.)Towards Multimedia Thesaurus Support for Media-based Navigation (P H Lewis et al.)Distance to Deformable Prototypes: Encoding Shape Categories for Efficient Search (S Sclaroff)Context-Sensitive and Context-Free Retrieval in a Video Database System (Q Li & K M Lam)Shot Break Detection and Camera Motion Classification in Digital Video (M Haas et al.)IFS Based Indexing in Image Databases (M Nappi et al.)and other papers Readership: Computer scientists, engineers and web specialists. Keywords:Content-Based Image Retrieval;CBIR;Image Databases;Features;Multimedia;Search Engines;Conference;Visual Information Systems;Visual Similarity;Visual Browsing

As consumer costs for multimedia devices such as digital cameras and Web phones have decreased and diversity in the market has skyrocketed, the amount of digital information has grown considerably. Intelligent Multimedia Databases and Information Retrieval: Advancing Applications and Technologies details the latest information retrieval technologies and applications, the research surrounding the field, and the methodologies and design related to multimedia databases. Together with academic researchers and developers from both information retrieval and artificial intelligence fields, this book details issues and semantics of data retrieval with contributions from around the globe. As the information and data from multimedia databases continues to expand, the research and documentation surrounding it should keep pace as best as possible, and this book provides an excellent resource for the latest developments.

This book consists of the refereed proceedings of the 15th British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD 15, held in London, in July 1997. The 12 revised full papers presented were selected from more than 30 submissions. Also included are 10 poster presentations and the invited lecture on The Role of Intelligent Software Agents in Advanced Information Systems by Larry Kerschberg. The papers are organized in topical sections on transaction processing, optimization, object-orientation and the Internet, and database integration.

Technology has spurred the growth of huge image and video libraries, many growing into the hundreds of terabytes. As a result there is a great demand among organizations for the design of databases that can effectively support the storage, search, retrieval, and transmission of video data. Engineers and researchers in the field demand a comprehensi

Database Semantics: Semantic Issues in Multimedia Systems reflects the state of the art of emerging research on the meaning of multimedia information, as presented during IFIP's Eighth Data Semantics Working Conference (DS-8), organized by its Working Group 2.6 on Databases, and held at Rotorua, New Zealand, in January 1999. DS-8 was planned as an active forum for researchers and practitioners focusing on those issues that involve the semantics of the information represented, stored, and manipulated by multimedia systems. Depending on the topic and state of research, issues may be covered either deeply theoretically or quite practically, or even both. These proceedings contain twenty-one papers carefully selected by an International Programme Committee and organized in six thematic areas: Video Data Modelling and Use; Image Databases; Applications of Multimedia Systems; Multimedia Modeling in General; Multimedia Information Retrieval; Semantics and Metadata. For almost every area, important topics and issues include: data modeling and query languages for media such as audio, video, and images; methodological aspects of multimedia database design; intelligent multimedia information retrieval; knowledge discovery and data mining in multimedia information; multimedia user interfaces. Three visionary keynote addresses, by famous experts Ramesh Jain, Hermann Maurer and Masao Sakauchi, set the stage for discussion and future directions for the field. The collection of papers that resulted now offers a glimpse of the excitement and enthusiasm from DS-8. Database Semantics: Semantic Issues in Multimedia Systems is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate-level course on database systems, multimedia systems, or information retrieval systems and as a reference for practitioners and researchers in industry.