8.7. Conclusion

In this chapter, we presented an overview on the theory, techniques, and applications of content-based image retrieval. We took patterns of use and computation as the pivotal building blocks of our survey.

From a scientific perspective, the following trends can be distinguished. First, large-scale image databases are being created. Obviously, large-scale data sets provide different image mining problems than do small, narrow-domain data sets. Second, research is directed toward the integration of different information modalities such as text, pictorial, and motion. Third, relevance feedback was and still is an important issue. Finally, invariance is necessary to get to general-purpose image retrieval.

From a societal/commercial perspective, it is obvious that there will be an enormous increase in the amount of digital images used in various communication frameworks, such as promotion, sports, education, and publishing. Further, digital images have become one of the major multimedia information sources on the Internet, where the amount of image/video on the Web is growing each day. Moreover, with the introduction of the new-generation cellphones, a tremendous market will be opened for the storage and management of pictorial data. Due to this tremendous amount of pictorial information, image mining and search tools are required, since indexing, searching, and assessing the content of large-scale image databases is inherently a time-consuming operation when done by human operators. Therefore, product suites for content-based video indexing and searching is not only necessary but essential for future content owners in the field of entertainment, news, education, video communication, and distribution.

We hope that from this review you get the picture in this new pictorial world.