Welcome to the first Internet Imaging Conference at IS&T/SPIE's International Symposium on Electronic Imaging.
An old adage states that an image is worth a thousand words. This notion may explain why the Web as a communications medium for the masses is mainly an imaging medium. For us scientists and engineers, however, this notion brings new challenges. A screenfull of textual information requires 24 x 80 = 1920 bytes to store and transmit. The corresponding image is 640 x 480 pixels at a depth of 3 bytes, for a total of 921,600 bytes, an expansion by a factor of 480. What is easier for the human is harder for the machine.
The motivation for this conference on Internet imaging is that as a consequence of the above observation we are seeing a shift in the focus of electronic imaging. While before the processing power's increase according to Moore's Law has fostered the development of image processing algorithms of ever increasing sophistication, the new focus is on image communication. This shift takes place at all processing interfaces:
In this conference we focus on the last item, more specifically on the Internet. Images do not only require more communications bandwidth; the shift from text to still and moving images creates a great demand of tools for browsing and querying visual information, without imposing any constraint on their nature, format or subject.
As images are often mentally processed in visual terms alone, without any corresponding translation or recording into verbal labels or representations, papers in the first three sessions investigate image classification and content-based image indexing & retrieval. Most of these describe new image analysis solutions that correlate visual elements, such as color, texture, object shape, and spatial relationships with image semantic content. However, notwithstanding the substantial progress made, the integrated management of the different features remains complex and application dependent as retrieval is to be performed according to a similarity measure that should agree with the user's perception. We note several different incarnations of the notion of similarity.
For browsing or searching images and video on the Internet, flexible interfaces and visualization tools are required; these topics are also addressed and it is expected that they will attract more attention in the future.
A session on architecture and compression focusses on classical system issues, but the papers present some interesting new solutions that are made possible by the Internet. A particularly hard problem area is that of color reproduction, because the Internet is the opposite of a desktop publishing system. While the latter is used in a controlled environment and the goal is to achieve color fidelity, on the Internet there is very little or no control of device characteristics and viewing conditions.
Besides being the new communications medium for the masses, the Internet is still an important tool for its inceptors, namely the scientists. The ability to collaboratively explore and manipulate visual data accelerates scientific progress and yields to new insights. Last but not least, the next generation of workers will be much more scientifically literate, because each pupil can now instantaneously access the same data as scientists, using the same research tools.
For education, Internet imaging may have an impact of similar magnitude as Diderot's encyclopedia of the Enlightenment age. The challenge is to overcome this flattening of information by creating opportunities for vertical activities, i.e., to help people in K12 and beyond to not just accumulate information but to take action and make commitments, or -- to paraphrase Kierkegaard -- to create tools that allow them to evolve from the esthetical to the ethical sphere.
The last session in this conference is dedicated to distribution issues. We have compared the leverage of the Web on the Internet to the leverage of Manutius and publishing on Gutenberg's moving type press. The dissemination of presses in the Venetian Republic had another less glamorous effect: the invention of business forms and modern accounting, which has revolutionized business transactions. The Internet will have a similar revolutionary impact on how business transactions are performed, and imaging plays a very important role in it.
This conference is for you and with you. Please network with the speakers and the other participants, and interact with us. Tell us how we can improve the conference and make it more worthwhile. We hope we are providing a stimulating experience that will lead to a paper of yours in the 2001 conference.
Giordano Beretta, Hewlett-Packard Co.
Raimondo Schettini, CNR (Italy)
Conference Chairs