Visual Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries

The emergence of information highways and multimedia computing has resulted in redefining the concept of libraries. It is widely believed that in the next few years, a significant portion of information in libraries will be in the form of multimedia electronic documents. Many approaches are being proposed for storing, retrieving, assimilating, harvesting, and prospecting information from these multimedia documents. Digital libraries are expected to allow users to access information independent of the locations and types of data sources and will provide a unified picture of information. In this paper, we discuss requirements of these emerging information systems and present query methods and data models for these systems. Finally, we briefly present a few examples of approaches that provide a preview of how things will be done in the digital libraries in the near future.published or submitted for publicatio

Optimizing Spatial Databases

This paper describes the best way to improve the optimization of spatial databases: through spatial indexes. The most commune and utilized spatial indexes are R-tree and Quadtree and they are presented, analyzed and compared in this paper. Also there are given a few examples of queries that run in Oracle Spatial and are being supported by an R-tree spatial index. Spatial databases offer special features that can be very helpful when needing to represent such data. But in terms of storage and time costs, spatial data can require a lot of resources. This is why optimizing the database is one of the most important aspects when working with large volumes of data.Spatial Database, Spatial Index, R-tree, Quadtree, Optimization

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Recent Developments in Cultural Heritage Image Databases: Directions for User-Centered Design

published or submitted for publicatio

Vision of a Visipedia

The web is not perfect: while text is easily searched and organized, pictures (the vast majority of the bits that one can find online) are not. In order to see how one could improve the web and make pictures first-class citizens of the web, I explore the idea of Visipedia, a visual interface for Wikipedia that is able to answer visual queries and enables experts to contribute and organize visual knowledge. Five distinct groups of humans would interact through Visipedia: users, experts, editors, visual workers, and machine vision scientists. The latter would gradually build automata able to interpret images. I explore some of the technical challenges involved in making Visipedia happen. I argue that Visipedia will likely grow organically, combining state-of-the-art machine vision with human labor

Multimedia Information Retrieval nelle biblioteche

The paper aims to introduce libraries to the view that operating within the terms of traditional Information Retrieval (IR), only through textual language, is limitative, and that considering broader criteria, as those of Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR), is necessary. The paper stresses the story of MIR fundamental principles, from early years of questioning on documentation to today’s theories on semantic means. New issues for a LIS methodology of processing and searching multimedia documents are theoretically argued, introducing MIR as a holistic whole composed by content-based and semantic information retrieval methodologies. MIR offers a better information searching way: every kind of digital document can be analyzed and retrieved through the elements of language appropriate to its own nature. MIR approach directly handles the concrete content of documents, also considering semantic aspects. Paper conclusions remark the organic integration of the revolutionary contentual conception of information processing with an improved semantics conception, gathering and composing advantages of both systems for accessing to information.L'articolo vuole introdurre le biblioteche alla prospettiva che operare entro i termini dell'Information Retrieval (IR) tradizionale mediante il solo uso del linguaggio testuale è limitativo, e che prendere in considerazione i criteri più ampi del Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR) è invece necessario. L'articolo illustra la storia dei principi fondamentali del MIR, a partire dai primi anni di dibattito sulla documentazione fino alle teorie odierne sui significati semantici. Vengono dibattute nuovi argomentazioni teoriche per una metodologia LIS di trattamento e ricerca di documenti multimediali, proponendo il MIR come un tutto olistico composto da metolodogie di information retrieval semantico e basato sul contenuto. Il MIR offre modalità di ricerca migliori: ogni tipologia di documento digitale può essere analizzata e recuperata attraverso elementi del linguaggio appropriato alla sua specifica natura. L'approccio del MIR si basa sulla gestione diretta del contenuto dei documenti, considerando anche gli aspetti semantici. Le conclusioni dell'articolo rimarcano l'integrazione organica della rivoluzione della concezione di tipo contenutistico del trattamento dell'informazione con una concezione semantica migliorata, raccogliendo e componendo i vantaggi di entrambi i sistemi per l'accesso all'informazione

Colour-based image retrieval algorithms based on compact colour descriptors and dominant colour-based indexing methods

Content based image retrieval (CBIR) is reported as one of the most active research areas in the last two decades, but it is still young. Three CBIR’s performance problem in this study is inaccuracy of image retrieval, high complexity of feature extraction, and degradation of image retrieval after database indexing. This situation led to discrepancies to be applied on limited-resources devices (such as mobile devices). Therefore, the main objective of this thesis is to improve performance of CBIR. Images’ Dominant Colours (DCs) is selected as the key contributor for this purpose due to its compact property and its compatibility with the human visual system. Semantic image retrieval is proposed to solve retrieval inaccuracy problem by concentrating on the images’ objects. The effect of image background is reduced to provide more focus on the object by setting weights to the object and the background DCs. The accuracy improvement ratio is raised up to 50% over the compared methods. Weighting DCs framework is proposed to generalize this technique where it is demonstrated by applying it on many colour descriptors. For reducing high complexity of colour Correlogram in terms of computations and memory space, compact representation of Correlogram is proposed. Additionally, similarity measure of an existing DC-based Correlogram is adapted to improve its accuracy. Both methods are incorporated to produce promising colour descriptor in terms of time and memory space complexity. As a result, the accuracy is increased up to 30% over the existing methods and the memory space is decreased to less than 10% of its original space. Converting the abundance of colours into a few DCs framework is proposed to generalize DCs concept. In addition, two DC-based indexing techniques are proposed to overcome time problem, by using RGB and perceptual LUV colour spaces. Both methods reduce the search space to less than 25% of the database size with preserving the same accuracy

Advance of the Access Methods

The goal of this paper is to outline the advance of the access methods in the last ten years as well as to make review of all available in the accessible bibliography methods