Image Retrieval in Multimedia Databases: A Survey

In the past decades the advancement in the area of database management systems shifts towards multimedia. Multimedia information is very expressive, self explanatory, narrative, etc. Now a day the development of digital media, advanced network infrastructure and the easily available consumer electronics makes the multimedia revolution to run in an alarming rate. Inline with the advancement of database technology that incorporates multimedia data, an open question that always rose in the technology is how to retrieve/search images in the multimedia databases. There are a huge number of research works focusing on the searching mechanisms in image databases for efficient retrieval and tried to give supplementary suggestions on the overall systems. The growing of digital medias (digital camera, digital video, digital TV, e-book, cell phones, etc.) gave rise to the revolution of very large multimedia databases, in which the need of efficient storage, organization and retrieval of multimedia contents came into question. Among the multimedia data, this survey paper focuses on the different methods (approaches) and their evaluation techniques used by many of recent research works on image retrieval system. Many researchers develop and use lots of approaches towards image retrieval. This paper, in general, classified image retrieval into text based and content based, including the newly growing ontology based image retrieval system as one focus. We address, in this paper, the challenges, techniques and evaluation methods used in image retrieval systems through a detailed look of most recent works.