Images and video play a crucial role in visual information
systems and multimedia. There is an extraordinary number of
applications of such systems in entertainment, business, art,
engineering, and science. Such applications often involved large image
and video collections, and therefore, searching for images and video
in large collections is becoming an important operation. Because of
the size of such databases, efficiency is crucial. We strongly believe
that image and video retrieval need an integrated approach from fields
such as image processing, shape processing, perception, database
indexing, visualization, and querying, etc.

This book contains a selection of results that was presented at the
Dagstuhl Seminar on Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval, in
December 1999. The purpose of this seminar was to bring together
people from the various fields, in order to promote information
exchange and interaction among researchers who are interested in
various aspects of accessing the content of image and video data. The
book provides an overview of the state of the art in content-based
image and video retrieval. The topics covered by the chapters are
integrated system aspects, as well as techniques from image
processing, computer vision, multimedia, databases, graphics, signal
processing, and information theory.

The book will be of interest to researchers and professionals in the
fields of multimedia, visual information (database) systems, computer
vision, and information retrieval.