The focus is on the required functionality, techniques, and evaluation criteria for multimedia information retrieval systems. Since this is a one-day workshop, we have chosen three focus areas in the intelligent analysis and retrieval area. The first focus of this workshop is on integrating information from various media sources in order to handle multimodal queries on large, diverse databases. In such cases, a query may be decomposed into a set of media queries, each involving a different indexing scheme. The second focus deals with examples of research using content and organization of multimedia information into semantic classes.
Users pose and expect a retrieval to provide answers to semantic questions.
In practice this is difficult to achieve. Building structures that encode semantic information in a fairly domain independent and robust manner is extremely difficult. A quick review of computer vision research over the last few years points to this difficulty. In many cases, image content can be used in conjunction with user interaction and domain specificity to retrieve semantically meaningful information. However, it is clear that retrieval by similarity of visual attributes when used arbitrarily cannot provide semantically meaningful information.