Pictures are not taken in a vacuum - an overview of exploiting context for semantic scene content understanding

Considerable research has been devoted to the problem of multimedia indexing and retrieval in the past decade. However, limited by state-of-the-art in image understanding, the majority of the existing content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems have taken a relatively low-level approach and fallen short of higher-level interpretation and knowledge. Recent research has begun to focus on bridging the semantic and conceptual gap that exists between man and computer by integrating knowledge-based techniques, human perception, scene content understanding, psychology, and linguistics. In this article, we provide an overview of exploiting context for semantic scene content and understanding.