Multimedia information retrieval: new challenges in audio visual search (Workshop Report)

[FIRST PARAGRAPHS] With the rising popularity of rich media services such as Flickr, YouTube, and Jumpcut, new challenges in large scale multimedia information retrieval have emerged that not only rely on meta-data but on content-based information retrieval combined with the collective knowledge of users and geo-referenced meta-data that is captured during the creation process. For the future, it is envisioned that multimedia search in mobile environments or on P2P networks will take off on a large scale.

This workshop followed four previous SIGIR workshops on multimedia information retrieval (1998, 1999, 2003, 2005), and aimed to address and explore new challenges in multimedia information retrieval by bringing both researchers and practitioners together. We encouraged submission and participation in this workshop not only from the core information retrieval community but also from researchers in databases, multimedia and image processing thus cross-fertilizing to information retrieval research.