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.

In the last few years we have observed an explosive growth of multimedia computing, communication and applications. This revolution is transforming the way people live, work, and interact with each other, and is impacting the way business, government services, education, entertainment and healthcare are operating. Yet, several issues related to modeling, specification, analysis and design of distributed multimedia database systems and multimedia information retrieval are still challenging to both researchers and praclitioners. Distributed Multimedia Databases: Techniques and Applications points out these challenges and provides valuable suggestions toward the necessary solutions, by focusing on multimedia database techniques.

Business intelligence has always been considered an essential ingredient for success. However, it is not until recently that the technology has enabled organizations to generate and deploy intelligence for global competition. These technologies can be leveraged to create the intelligent enterprises of the 21st century that will not only provide excellent and customized services to their customers, but will also create business efficiency for building relationships with suppliers and other business partners on a long term basis. Creating such intelligent enterprises requires the understanding and integration of diverse enterprise components into cohesive intelligent systems. Anticipating that future enterprises need to become intelligent, Intelligent Enterprises of the 21st Century brings together the experiences and knowledge from many parts of the world to provide a compendium of high quality theoretical and applied concepts, methodologies, and techniques that help diffuse knowledge and skills required to create and manage intelligent enterprises of the 21st century for gaining sustainable competitive advantage in a global environment. This book is a comprehensive compilation of the state of the art vision and thought processes needed to design and manage globally competitive business organizations.

The World Wide Web and the Internet are signs 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 Alta Vista are already accepted tools for textual information, image databases 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.

This volume contains papers presented at the Third International Workshop on Visual Form. It covers the most important topics of current interest in the field, presenting an updated collection of results achieved by leading academic and industrial research groups from several countries. The book contains invited lectures and research papers dealing with theoretical and applicative aspects of shape perception, representation, decomposition, description and recognition, as well as related topics.

supporting the Conference.

This volume contains all papers presented at SSPR 2002 and SPR 2002 hosted by the University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, August 6-9, 2002. This was the third time these two workshops were held back-to-back. SSPR was the ninth International Workshop on Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition and the SPR was the fourth International Workshop on Statis- cal Techniques in Pattern Recognition. These workshops have traditionally been held in conjunction with ICPR (International Conference on Pattern Recog- tion), and are the major events for technical committees TC2 and TC1, resp- tively, of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR). The workshops were held in parallel and closely coordinated. This was an attempt to resolve the dilemma of how to deal, in the light of the progressive specialization of pattern recognition, with the need for narrow-focus workshops without further fragmenting the ?eld and introducing yet another conference that would compete for the time and resources of potential participants. A total of 116 papers were received from many countries with the submission and reviewingprocesses beingcarried out separately for each workshop. A total of 45 papers were accepted for oral presentation and 35 for posters. In addition four invited speakers presented informative talks and overviews of their research. They were: Tom Dietterich, Oregon State University, USA Sven Dickinson, the University of Toronto, Canada Edwin Hancock, University of York, UK Anil Jain, Michigan State University, USA SSPR 2002 and SPR 2002 were sponsored by the IAPR and the University of Windsor.

The book describes several techniques used to bridge the semantic gap and reflects on recent advancements in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). It presents insights into and the theoretical foundation of various essential concepts related to image searches, together with examples of natural and texture image types. The book discusses key challenges and research topics in the context of image retrieval, and provides descriptions of various image databases used in research studies. The area of image retrieval, and especially content-based image retrieval (CBIR), is a very exciting one, both for research and for commercial applications. The book explains the low-level features that can be extracted from an image (such as color, texture, shape) and several techniques used to successfully bridge the semantic gap in image retrieval, making it a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in the area of CBIR alike.