12 – Active Indexing

Publisher Summary In image information retrieval, an important issue is how to index image objects, so that the visual objects can be accessed quickly and certain actions can be performed automatically. This chapter introduces the active index for content-based image information retrieval. The dynamic nature of the active index is its most important characteristic. The main applications of the active index are to prefetch image and multimedia data, and to facilitate similarity retrieval. The experimental active index system is also described in the chapter. The fundamental building block of an active cell is an index cell (IC). In implementing the experimental active index system, each cell is provided with an internal memory. Theoretically, the internal memory and the internal state together define the true state of the index cell. In practice, it is more convenient to have an internal working memory, so that the cells can cope with different situations flexibly.