This text constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Visual Information Systems, VISUAL 2002, held in Hsin Chu, Taiwan, in March 2002. The 28 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on content-based indexing, search and retrieval visual information, system architectures, image/video databases, networked video and applications in various fields.