Yong Rui - Böcker

"Exploration of Visual Data" presents research efforts in the area of content-based exploration of image and video data. The main objective is to bridge the semantic gap between high-level concepts in the human mind and low-level features extractable by the machines. The two key issues emphasized are "content-awareness" and "user-in-the-loop". The authors provide a comprehensive review on algorithms for visual feature extraction based on colour, texture, shape and structure, and techniques for incorporating such information to aid browsing, exploration, search and streaming of image and video data. They also discuss issues related to the mixed use of textual and low-level visual features to facilitate more effective access of multimedia data. To bridge the semantic gap, significant recent research efforts have also been put on learning during user interactions, which is also known as "relevance feedback". The difficulty and challenge also come from the personalized information need of each user and a small amount of feedbacks the machine could obtain through real-time user interaction.The authors present and discuss several recently proposed classification and learning techniques that are specifically designed for this problem, with kernel- and boosting-based approaches for nonlinear extensions. "Exploration of Visual Data" provides state-of-the-art materials on the topics of content-based description of visual data, content-based low-bitrate video streaming, and latest asymmetric and nonlinear relevance feedback algorithms, which to date are unpublished.

Exploration of Visual Data presents latest research efforts in the area of content-based exploration of image and video data. The main objective is to bridge the semantic gap between high-level concepts in the human mind and low-level features extractable by the machines.The two key issues emphasized are "content-awareness" and "user-in-the-loop". The authors provide a comprehensive review on algorithms for visual feature extraction based on color, texture, shape, and structure, and techniques for incorporating such information to aid browsing, exploration, search, and streaming of image and video data. They also discuss issues related to the mixed use of textual and low-level visual features to facilitate more effective access of multimedia data.Exploration of Visual Data provides state-of-the-art materials on the topics of content-based description of visual data, content-based low-bitrate video streaming, and latest asymmetric and nonlinear relevance feedback algorithms, which to date are unpublished.

This volume contains the proceeding of the 5th International Conference on - age and Video Retrieval (CIVR), July 13–15, 2006, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA: http://www. civr2006. org. Image and video retrieval cont- ues to be one of the most exciting and fast-growing research areas in the ?eld of multimedia technology. However, opportunities for exchanging ideas between researchers and users of image and video retrieval systems are still limited. The InternationalConferenceonImageandVideo Retrieval(CIVR)hastakenonthe mission of bringing together these communities to allow researchers and prac- tioners around the world to share points of view on image and video retrieval. A uniquefeatureoftheconferenceistheemphasisonparticipationfrompractiti- ers. The objective is to illuminate critical issues and energize both communities for the continuing exploration of novel directions for image and video retrieval. We receivedover 90 submissions for the conference. Eachpaper wascarefully reviewed by three members of the program committee, and then checked by one of the program chairs and/or general chairs. The program committee consisted of more than 40 experts in image and video retrieval from Europe, Asia and North America, and we drew upon approximately 300 high-quality reviews to ensure a thorough and fair review process. The paper submission and review process was fully electronic, using the EDAS system. The quality of the submitted papers was very high, forcing the committee members to make some di?cult decisions. Due to time and space constraints, we could only accept 18 oral papers and 30 poster papers.