Dear Colleagues,

Thanks to the advances in compression and storage technologies, massive amounts of image and video material are produced daily in a broad range of different application contexts such as biomedicine, social networks, cultural heritage and digital libraries. Once it has been stored, the potential of this material largely depends on the availability of models and tools for making it accessible effectively and efficiently to different users matching different profiles. The development of paradigms and theories to address this challenging issue has been the goal of visual information retrieval research that now builds upon consolidated models defined in the last decade to face new challenges in the design of usable system interfaces and interaction paradigms for querying, browsing and summarization, the definition of models for learning visual concepts from large and unstructured image and video collections, the definition of indexing structures to enable efficient access to local and distributed repositories.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to bring together a number of research papers for providing a representative view of the frontier of this research field. Original, high quality papers are solicited that address challenging issues in the field of visual information retrieval, including

• Large-scale and web-scale indexing and retrieval of visual information
• Integration of content, meta data and social network
• Scalable and distributed search
• Novel interfaces and interaction paradigms for search and retrieval of visual information
• Visual content descriptors and similarity metrics
• Indexing algorithms
• Machine learning for visual concept learning and detection
• Large-scale summarization and visualization
• Performance evaluation
• Navigation and browsing on the Web
• Visual information retrieval systems and applications

Categories and Subject Descriptors:

• H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval
• I.2.6 [Artificial Intelligence]: Learning
• I.4.9 [Image Processing and Computer Vision]: Applications

Additional Keywords:

• visual information retrieval
• image search
• video retrieval
• image databases
• image and video indexing
• human-computer interaction
• visual concepts learning in social media