Multimodal Information Access and Retrieval Notable Work and Milestones

There is information explosion in this era; documents of all genres are available at the tip of our hands. The proliferation of digital data like images, audios and videos both on the Internet and on user's personal computers, have led the researchers across the globe to develop an efficient access and retrieval technique that could meet the real time need of the user. Since information exists in divergent modalities, therefore we are in need of a model where different modalities could be used to get access of information present in single modality. The explosion of data together with user's instantaneous need of accurate information signify that Multimodal Information Access and Retrieval techniques have emerged as a big research challenge in all domains including medical, defense, and aircraft etc. This paper introduces important hurdles encountered by MIAR systems and prominent research work which have been undertaken to address these challenges. Further it highlights problems in MIAR systems which are still not addressed. The objective of this work is to lay foundation for researchers willing to work in this area so that they could have deep knowledge of this challenging and exciting research field.