Special issue on visual information retrieval

This special issue provides an overview of important work and the leading research directions in the area of visual information retrieval. With the flood of images and video from diverse sources (e.g., smartphones, NetFlix, FLICKR, Amazon, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), there is a great need to be able to browse, index and search through the mountain of visual data. The papers within this special issue are amongst the top scientific work worldwide in visual information retrieval and provide a snapshot of the state-of-the-art. All submissions were triple peer-reviewed and then given a summary review by a member of the editorial board. This year each paper had to be recommended by a member of the IJMIR editorial board and a program chair from ICMR. I would like to thank Tat-Seng Chua, Yu-Gang Jiang, Cees Snoek and Nunu Vansconcelos for their assistance in the paper selection process. One of the current frontier areas is searching for video over the Internet. In the paper, “Text-to-video: a semantic search