Immersion into visual media: new applications of image understanding

Using images to interface machines and humans offers an exciting new application domain for image understanding (IU). This article describes two such applications: digital libraries that bring visual data to the user, and virtualized reality that brings users to the visual data. The digital library calls on IU techniques such as scene segmentation and content analysis, and joins together natural language analysis and IU. Virtualized reality uses precise, dense, and video-rate stereo reconstruction techniques