We describe the Photobook system, which is a set of interactive tools for browsing and searching images and image sequences. These query tools differ from those used in standard image databases in that they make direct use of the image content rather than relying on text annotations. Direct search on image content is made possible by use of semantics-preserving image compression, which reduces images to a small set of perceptually-significant coefficients. We describe three types of Photobook descriptions in detail: one that allows search based on appearance, one that uses 2-D shape, and a third that allows search based on textural properties. These image content descriptions can be combined with each other and with textbased descriptions to provide a sophisticated browsing and search capability. In this paper we demonstrate Photobook on databases containing images of people, video keyframes, hand tools, fish, texture swatches, and 3-D medical data.

Considering the fact that most of the multimedia database systems include querying by object features, a novel approach for color and shape querying and retrieval is proposed. The approach is histogram-based and it is supported by an auxiliary object extraction tool in the query-by-feature component of a multimedia database system. The object extraction tool is semi-automatic, hence it can successfully capture salient object regions for most of the images and/or video frames. The use of the object extraction tool facilitates object-based querying of color and shape content. In the histogram-based approach, the color and shape can be integrated to improve the performance of querying. It is shown through performance experiments that the histogram-based approach overcomes the deficiencies of the existing methods for querying by shape. The evaluation of the effectiveness and the robustness of the histogram-based approach is also presented via performance experiments.

There is already a huge demand for efficient image indexing and content-based retrieval. With TV going digital, advances in real-time video decompression, easy access to the Internet and the availability of cheap mass storage and fast graphics adaptor cards, digital video will become the next "big " media. Unfortunately, automatic indexing and feature extraction from digital video is even harder than still-image analysis. Presently, automatic analysis of digital video is mostly restricted to automatic detection of scene changes. In this paper we present a framework suitable to immediately explore the consequences of content-based video retrieval with a high granularity of video content. The frameworks employs semantic networks to represent video contents on a high level of abstraction and uses time-varying sensitive regions to link objects in a video to the knowledge base. A prototype was implemented under NEXTSTEP, exploiting the rich user-interface capabilities of this platform to feature drag & drop queries and authoring of the video retrieval system.

We describe the Photobook system, which is a set of interactive tools for browsing and searching images and image sequences. These query tools differ from those used in standard image databases in that they make direct use of the image content rather than relying on text annotations. Direct search on image content is made possible by use of semantics-preserving image compression, which reduces images to a small set of perceptually-significant coefficients. We describe three types of Photobook descriptions in detail: one that allows search based on appearance, one that uses 2-D shape, and a third that allows search based on textural properties. These image content descriptions can be combined with each other and with textbased descriptions to provide a sophisticated browsing and search capability. In this paper we demonstrate Photobook on databases containing images of people, video keyframes, hand tools, fish, texture swatches, and 3-D medical data. 1 Introduction: The Problem Digita...