edited by Arnold Smeulders (University of Amsterdam) & Ramesh Jain (University of California, San Diego)

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.

• 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