Towards Large-Scale Multimedia Exploration

With the advent of the information age and the increasing size and complexity of multimedia databases, the question of how to support users in getting access and insight into those large databases has become immensely important. While traditional content-based retrieval approaches provide query-driven access under the assumption that the users’ information needs are clearly specied, modern content-based exploration approaches support users in browsing and navigating through multimedia databases in the case of imprecise or even unknown information needs. By means of interactive graphical user interfaces, exploration approaches oer a convenient and intuitive access to unknown multimedia databases which becomes even more important with the arrival of powerful mobile devices. In this paper, we formulate challenges of user-centric multimedia exploration with a particular focus on large-scale multimedia databases. We claim that adaptability and scalability should be researched on both conceptual as well as technical level in order to model multimedia exploration approaches which are able to cope with millions of multimedia objects in near-realtime.