In movies, we may wish to create annotations that denote changes in the scene, that expose telling events in the story, or that pick out the presence of various actors. Such an annotated movie will be viewed more often than it is recorded, so analysis cost is spread over each screening. Likewise for libraries, the value of an archive is in its index. While original content can often be obtained via delayed electronic or physical delivery, simplifying the search is the role of the archivist. Picard explores this topic in the paper on video and image libraries.
Any infrastructure needs to address issues of security and intellectual property.
With respect to images, this is an especially interesting task because images can be cut and pasted, torn and sheared, and segmented and reassembled into entirely new works where the train of ownership is lost. Similarly, a recent magazine cover showed a composite picture comprised of over 1400 individual blocks, each of which was a minified image. Walter Bender et al. describe attempts to indelibly watermark and add data to such images, both as carriers of annotation and as ownership stamps. An implicit picture model dictates the vocabulary of picture understanding and the repertoire of actions one may take to compress that sequence. Two-dimensional models incorporate various textural and motion assumptions and thereby simplify processing pictures that obey the model.