Visual Info Retrieval

Recently I gave the key note talk at Computer Systems and Technology conference in Varna, Bulgaria. The title of the talk was: Visual Information Retrieval: The next frontier in search. For the proceedings of the conference I had to write a paper. Here is the abstract of the paper — the full paper can be seen at
www.ics.uci.edu/~jain/papers

The abstract of the paper is:

The first ten years of search techniques for WWW have been concerned with text documents. The nature of data on WWW and in computing is rapidly changing and is fast moving towards multimedia, including text. We believe that the next major frontier in search is the visual search based on visual information retrieval. This search will in fact take us to multimedia search. In this paper, we present some ideas related to the history of visual search and how it is evolving. We also present our perspective in this area.