At its very core multimedia information retrieval means the process of searching for and
finding multimedia documents the corresponding research field is concerned with building the
best possible multimedia search engines. The intriguing bit here is that the query itself can
be a multimedia excerpt: For example when you walk around in an unknown place and stumble
across an interesting landmark would it not be great if you could just take a picture with
your mobile phone and send it to a service that finds a similar picture in a database and tells
you more about the building -- and about its significance for that matter? This book goes
further by examining the full matrix of a variety of query modes versus document types. How do
you retrieve a music piece by humming? What if you want to find news video clips on forest
fires using a still image? The text discusses underlying techniques and common approaches to
facilitate multimedia search engines from metadata driven retrieval via piggy-back text
retrieval where automated processes create text surrogates for multimedia automated image
annotation and content-based retrieval. The latter is studied in great depth looking at
features and distances and how to effectively combine them for efficient retrieval to a point
where the readers have the ingredients and recipe in their hands for building their own
multimedia search engines. Supporting users in their resource discovery mission when hunting
for multimedia material is not a technological indexing problem alone. We look at interactive
ways of engaging with repositories through browsing and relevance feedback roping in
geographical context and providing visual summaries for videos. The book concludes with an
overview of state-of-the-art research projects in the area of multimedia information retrieval
which gives an indication of the research and development trends and thereby a glimpse of the
future world. Table of Contents: What is Multimedia Information Retrieval? Basic Multimedia
Search Technologies Content-based Retrieval in Depth Added Services Multimedia
Information Retrieval Research Summary
