Indexing and retrieval of large quantity of multimedia data is a highly challenging and growingly important research problem for the multimedia research community.
Researchers in multimedia, databases, computer vision, machine learning, signal and image processing and statistics have worked on multimedia information retrieval for over a decade.
A number of significant technological advances have been achieved in this field.
Some of the techniques have been applied to real-world application areas such as art image retrieval, biomedical image and video retrieval, education, sensor networks, large-scale online personal and professional photo sharing communities, classification and filtering of images on the Web, scientific content (remote sensing and biodiversity), computer forensics, threat assessment and security applications more generally.