Theo Gevers, Graham Finlayson and Raimondo Schettini,
Color for Image Indexing and Retrieval,
Computer Vision and Image Understanding (special issue on Colour for Image Indexing and Retrieval),
94, 1-3, pp. 1-2, April/June 2004. (Editorial Introduction)There has been an enormous increase in the amount of multimedia information used in various communication frameworks such as education, entertainment, and news. Visual information (images and video) is one of the most promising sources of multimedia information, as it plays a key role in these communication frameworks. In fact, it will be the most natural form of communication for new technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones. This massive stimulus of the exploitation of visual information creates demands for advanced storage and retrieval technology for the management of large-scale image assets. In fact, visual data management is not only necessary but also essential for both society (e.g., news, e-education, and e-government) and economy (e.g., content owners). Although image data is the most natural data form in communication, it is not easy to access, as the semantics of an image are not easily deduced by a computer. To facilitate the extraction of these semantics, color has become a center of interest. The interest in color is due mainly to its superior discriminating power compared to gray-value information. Further, color provides powerful information for image data analysis, recognition, and visualization. This special issue is aimed at the dissemination of contributions in the area of color utilization in the exploration and visualization of image data repositories for the purpose of content-based image access ...