CHArt CHArt Computers and the History of Art - 1997 Conference Paper Abstract
Rapidly developing capabilities in the capture, storage, compression, transmission and analysis of electronic images have been greeted with enthusiasm by the international museum, archive and information/media services communities. They detect opportunities for enhanced exploitation of their collections, whilst acknowledging that their realisation calls for new approaches to the way in which their clients+ queries are introduced to, and processed by, the image retrieval system.
Traditional visual information retrieval systems are heavily dependent on a process of mediation, by means of which a client+s expression of need for image material can be translated into terms which are likely to occur in image metadata, or which trigger a picture researcher+s visualisation of a required scene, event or feature. In the new generation of visual information retrieval systems the human mediator may have to be simulated within the user interface, the latter needing to offer capabilities of a high order.
This paper will discuss the design challenges to be faced in such systems. Emphasis will be placed on the complexities of visual information need, informed by two, recently completed research projects which were undertaken in collaboration with a number of major picture libraries and archives in the UK. Consideration will then be given to the implications of these findings for image indexing policy, and the paper will conclude with some observations on the substitutability of the familiar linguistically-based image retrieval process by the pixel-based image analysis approaches which are engaging the attention of an expanding research community.
Peter Enser is Head of the School of Information Management at the University of Brighton. He has extensive experience in teaching, course development and management in Higher Education, together with research interests in visual image indexing and retrieval - a field in which he has directed externally funded research projects. He is currently Chair of Council and a Vice President of the Institute of Information Scientists.