Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGMM International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval, MIR 2004, October 15-16, 2004, New York, NY, USA

Welcome to the 6th ACM SIGMM International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval. Extending beyond the borders of culture, art, and science, the search for digital information is one of the major challenges of our time. Bio-computing & medical science, digital libraries, the Internet, streaming video, databases, cultural heritage collections and peer-2-peer networks have created a worldwide need for new paradigms and techniques on how to browse, search, and summarize multimedia collections. MIR'04 is a peer-reviewed meeting for scientific researchers and users to discuss important challenges in multimedia retrieval Following the success of the five previous MIR workshops held in conjunction with the ACM Multimedia Conferences, the purpose of the 6th ACM SIGMM International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR'04) is to discuss the state of the art between researchers, developers, and practitioners from academia and industry. In this workshop, we focussed on novel techniques and paradigms which expand the boundaries of the field. When selecting the contributions to be presented in this workshop, we aimed at representing the state-of-the-art in the challenge of searching for multimedia information. The 42 papers presented in these proceedings were selected from a total of 107 submissions. This considerable large number of submissions required considerable effort from the program committee and made the selection process very difficult. We hope that the papers presented here as well as the discussions at the workshop will define new issues and research challenges for the Multimedia Information Retrieval community