The growth of image content production and distribution over the world has exploded in recent years. This creates a compelling need for developing innovative tools for managing and retrieving images for many applications, such as web image search engines, medical decision support systems, etc. Until now, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) addresses the problem of finding images by automatically extracting low-level visual features. The main limitation of CBIR is due to the large semantic gap. A successful solution to bridge the semantic gap requires the investigation of...

Bangladesh, the eastern half of earth's largest delta, Bengal, is today an independent country of 163 million people. Among the 98% ethnic Bengali population, above 90 percent practice Islam.Surprisingly, Buddhism was the predominant religion of the region until the beginning of the 2nd millennium. In the midst of a long and fierce Brahman-Buddhist conflict, political Islam arrived in Bengal in the very early 13th century.Against the background of the above history, this book tells the story of successive religious and political transformations, touching upon the sensitive subject of Bengali...