Summary

Multimedia data, such as text, audio, images and video, are rapidly evolving as main avenues for the creation, exchange, and storage of information in the modern era. Primarily, this evolution is attributed to rapid advances in the three major technologies that determine the data's growth: VLSI technology that is producing greater processing power, broadband networks (e.g., ISDN, ATM, etc.) that are providing much higher bandwidth for many practical applications, and multimedia compression standards (e.g., JPEG, H.263, MPEG, MP3, etc.) that enable efficient storage and communication. The combination of these three advances is spurring the creation and processing of increasingly high-volume multimedia data, along with efficient compression and transmission over high-bandwidth networks. This current trend toward the removal of any conceivable bottleneck for those using multimedia data, from advanced research organizations to home users, has led to the explosive growth of visual information available in the form of digital libraries and online multimedia archives. According to a press release by Google Inc. in December 2001, the search engine offers access to over 3 billion Web documents and its Image search comprises more that 330 million images. Alta Vista Inc. has been serving around 25 million search queries per day in more than 25 languages, with its multimedia search featuring over 45 million images, videos, and audio clips.