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Abstract. The paper describes the prototype design and development of a multimedia system for museums and galleries. Key elements in the system are the introduction of 3-D models of museum artefacts together with 3-D as well as 2-D content based retrieval and navigation facilities and the development of a semantic layer, centred on an ontology for museums, which aims to expose the richness of knowledge associated with the museum collections and facilitate concept based retrieval and navigation integrated with that based on content and metadata. Interoperability protocols are designed to allow external applications to access the collection and an example is given of an e-Learning facility which uses models extracted to a virtual museum.

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Abstract-A new approach to image retrieval is presented in the domain of museum and gallery image collections. Specialist algorithms, developed to address specific retrieval tasks, are combined with more conventional content and metadata retrieval approaches, and implemented within a distributed architecture to provide cross-collection searching and navigation in a seamless way. External systems can access the different collections using interoperability protocols and open standards, which were extended to accommodate content based as well as text based retrieval paradigms. After a brief overview of the complete system, we describe the novel design and evaluation of some of the specialist image analysis algorithms including a method for image retrieval based on sub-image queries, retrievals based on very low quality images and retrieval using canvas crack patterns. We show how effective retrieval results can be achieved by real end-users consisting of major museums and galleries, accessing the distributed but integrated digital collections.Index Terms-Art images, content based image retrieval, crack analysis, wavelets.