Multimedia information retrieval at a crossroad: Review and outlook

In the late 1990s, the availability of powerful computing capability, large storage devices, high-speed networking and especially the advent of the Internet, led to a phenomenal growth of digital multimedia content in terms of size, diversity and impact. As suggested by its name, “multimedia” is a name given to a collection of multiple types of data, which include not only “traditional multimedia” such as images and videos, but also emerging media such as 3D graphics (like VRML objects) and Web animations (like Flash animations). Furthermore, multimedia techniques have been penetrating into a growing number of applications, ranging from document-editing software to digital libraries and many Web applications. For example, most people who have used Microsoft Word have tried to insert pictures and diagrams into their documents, and they have the experience of watching online video clips, such as movie trailers. In other words, multimedia data have been in every corner of the digital world. With the huge volume of multimedia data, finding and accessing the multimedia documents that satisfy people’s needs in an accurate and efficient manner became a non-trivial problem. This problem is defined as multimedia information retrieval.