Light-years from Lena: video and image libraries of the future

The average consumer with a personal computer will soon have access to the world\´s collections of digital video and images. However, the theory and tools that facilitate browsing, querying, retrieval, and manipulation of imagery are still in their infancy. For example, people would like to access content in movies, e.g. "fast forward to where they bicycle through the sky". This new application area reveals an abundance of unsolved scientific problems for image processing. An overview is provided of the key technical challenges that the image processing community should embrace. The scope of the paper is restricted to image processing, with particular focus on the problems of representation and analysis of image content, and frame-to-frame motion.