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The large amount of available multimedia information (e.g. videos, audio, images) requires efficient and effective annotation and retrieval methods. As videos start playing a more important role in the frame of multimedia, we want to make these available for content-based retrieval.The ImageMiner-System, which was developed at the University of Bremen in the AT group, is designed for content-based retrieval of single images by a new combination of techniques and methods from computer vision and artificial intelligence.In our approach to make videos available for retrieval in a large database of videos and images there are two necessary steps: First, the detection and extraction of shots from a video, which is done by a histogram based method and second, the construction of the separate frames in a shot to one still single image. This is performed by a mosaicing-technique. The resulting mosaiced image gives a one image visualization of the shot and can be analyzed by the the ImageMiner-System. ImageMiner has been tested on several domains, (e.g. landscape images, technical drawings), which cover a wide range of applications.

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The large amount of available multimedia information (e.g. videos, audio, images) requires efficient and effective annotation and retrieval methods.The System IRIS (Image Retrieval for Information Systems), which was developed at the Univers~ty of Bremen m the Al group. is designed for content-based retrieval of single images.As videos become a more important role in the frame of multimedia, we want to make videos available for IRIS [1].The basic idea to include wdeos mto the IRIS-System is to separate the whole video into shots -sequences with a sirntlar content and to create a single image for each detected shot. This image will contain the full information of the shot and can be processed with IRIS.The first part of the video analysis. This IS done by a color-histogram based method [4], where a Large difference in the histograms of two successive images indicates the beginning of a new shot.For every frame in the shot the dominant camera motion is estimated by deterring the optical flow for each pair of mccessive images m the sequence. This leads to the coordinate transformations from one image to the next one m the sequence. By appiying the appropriate transformations via a warping operation and merging the overlapping regions of the warped images, a single panoratmc mosaic image covering the entire visible area of the scene can be constructed [2] [3].The second part of the video analysis. After this process the videos are reduced to still images. A textual description can be created using IRIS.The basic concept of IRIS is, that it is more sophisticated and usual for human beings to use natural language concepts, e.g. sky, than syntactical features, e.g. b[ue region righ~up. Thts leads to a content-based image retrieval.Furthermore, it is unreasonable for any human being to make the content description for thousands of images manually. IRIS combines methods and techniques from computer vision and ArtificialIntelligence (AI) in a new way to generate content descriptions of images in a textual form automatically. The text retrieval can be done by an ordinary text-retrieval system.The two dominating goals of the IRIS-system are:q The images should be processed automatically. q The system shotdd offer a comfortable user interface with a comfortable query vocabtdary to formulate more complex queries by using concepts.To realize these goals, the IIUS-system is divided into two modules.The first main-module M divided in four submodules for image analysis, And the second main-module deals with the retrieval.There arc three modules for the low level feature extraction. The extracted features are: color, Texture, and Contour,The solor-segmentation makes use of color histograms in the HLS-color space. Second order statistical features trigger a classifying neural network to determine the texturesegmentation of the image. With a gradient-based edge detection and shape analysls, the contour-segmentation of the image is performed.Each of these sub-modules extracts segments concerning one of the features mentioned above. Th...

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