Special Session: Multimedia Indexing for Content Based Search

Marco Brambilla, Francesco Saverio Nucci

Abstract: Worldwide, the volume of stored information is growing exponentially, and an increasing share is audiovisual content. This content drives the demand for new services, making audiovisual search one of the major challenges for organisations and businesses today. Digital data is the greatest value that many organisations possess, and the ability to use it, rather than just store it, will be one of the most important strategic aspects in the coming decade. In this scenario, several research efforts focused on studying advanced search architectures for enabling consumers, businesses, and organisations to unlock the values found in audiovisual content through innovative access paradigms. In particular, the focus of current researches is on managing and enabling access to information sources of all types, supporting advanced audiovisual processing and content handling that will enhance control, creation, and sharing of multimedia for all users in the value chain. Several research projects financed by the European Commission tackle this problem from different perspectives and provide diverse visions for the future. This will impact in the mid-long term on audiovisual industry, allowing companies to provide more effective and efficient access to contents thanks to innovative annotation techniques and search paradigms. The aim of this CBMI special session, organized with the support of the PHAROS project, is to offer an overview of the research initiatives at European level that address the problems related to processing, annotation, indexing, and provisioning of contents within search applications. The session includes nine peer-reviewed contributions, reported in this volume, and an invited speech.