The World Wide Web and the Internet are signs things will be very different in the future. And what is so striking about this computer-age future is that it comes incredibly fast and is incredibly overwhelming. Anyone who has surfed the Web has exclaimed at one point or another that there is so much information available, so much to search and so much to keep up with.

Where Lycos and Alta Vista are already accepted tools for textual information, image databases and multimedia search engines are the natural answers in the quest for pictorial information. This book provides a state-of-the-art...