Multimedia Search Engines

Abstract

Multimedia is integral to both human and modern computer communications. As digital sound and imagery proliferate, the need to search for audio and visual information has increased. However, most popular search engines are still textual as described in Chapter 1, even though the diversity of Web content has transformed the Web from a merely textual to a multimedia-based repository. Web information content comes in a variety of audio, video, image, and text formats, a list of the most commonly found media formats and types being given in Table 4.1. The multimedia information is highly distributed, minimally indexed, and lacks appropriate schemas. The critical question in multimedia search is how to design a scalable, visual information retrieval system? Such audio and visual information systems require large resources for transmission, storage and processing, factors which make indexing, retrieving, and managing visual information an immense challenge.