Visual information retrieval

ND BUSINESSMAN CALVIN MOORES COINED the term information retrieval 10 to describe the process through which a prospective user of information can convert a request for information into a useful collection of references. Information retrieval, he wrote, embraces the intellectual aspects of the description of information and its specification for search, and also whatever systems, techniques, or machines that are employed Amarnath Gupta and Ramesh Jain 72 May 1997/Vol. 40, No. 5 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM lar expressions to describe a clip. There is also a deeper reason: The information sought is inherently in the form of imagery that a textual language, however powerful, is unable to express adequately, making query processing inefficient. HE ROLE OF THE EMERGING FIELD OF visual information retrieval (VIR) systems is to go beyond text-based descri