Multimedia indexing and retrieval

The workshop on Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval was held right after the SIGIR'98 conference in Melbourne. Approximately 30 people attended this workshop. The conference organizers gave a brief introduction to set the tone of the workshop. This was followed by an invited talk given by Donna Harman of NIST. Donna Harman said that NIST is interested in building a video database that will serve as a testbed for evaluating algorithms, similar to the TREC data set that is used for text retrieval applications. They had collected some informal feedback from video researchers on the characteristics of such a database and were interested in feedback from workshop participants. Following this, there was a paper session focusing on various topics in image retrieval, as well as models for search involving several media.