Multimedia information retrieval in the twenty-first century
Michael S. Lew · International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval · 2012
Welcome, friends and colleagues.Just one decade in the past would show our field as being composed of a few scattered workshops.Since then there has been tremendous growth in both research and applications.In the past 4 years, as a community we have published over a 1,000 peer reviewed research papers in areas ranging from image and audio retrieval to scientific and medical image search.We have developed our own test sets, software libraries, evaluation benchmarks, workshops and major conferences (notably ICMR, CIVR, and MIR).Only one important piece was missing to make the picture complete: a research journal.Now, it is my pleasure to introduce the first journal focused on our field, The International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval (IJMIR).Our new journal encompasses all topics related to retrieval, exploration, and mining of media databases and collections.It combines the vibrant areas related to retrieval of images, audio, video, and medical and scientific imagery with understanding of the human side of the system including the social aspects which are crucial to interactive search.An unarguable strength of our field is that it plays an important role in diverse scientific areas because many significant recent discoveries have been made through analyzing and searching local and international imaging databases.In our journal, there are essentially two paper categories: regular papers (original research) and surveys.Regular papers are typically triple peer reviewed and are meant to represent the novel research from the community.Surveys undergo a peer review from a senior community member and are meant to capture trends, illuminate critical problems, and give insight into the state-of-the-art.In