Research directions in image database management

This analysis is a panel discussion. There are many problems in the field of image database management. The object-oriented paradigm has been and continues to be a great impetus to this work. The semantics of images is essentially what they contain, and unless there is an effective method to identify their contents and index them on that basis, the database will degenerate to a collection of patterns with no semantics. This is the most challenging issue facing multimedia information systems in general, and image databases in particular. Work on query by image content has barely begun to scratch the surface. A few key query primitives will become well-understood and widely supported. To allow users to browse and search through information domains using sophisticated querying techniques that include imprecise queries, user-directed query processing, and queries that use similarity measures in order to retrieve data, new data modeling approaches are required. Key problems that arise in providing query by image content are considered