DIGITAL IMAGERY Digital images have a predominant position among multimedia data types. Unlike video and audio, which are mostly used by the entertainment and news industry, images are central to a wide variety of fields ranging from art history to medicine, including astronomy, oil exploration, and weather forecasting. Digital imagery plays a valuable role in numerous human activities, such as law enforcement, agriculture and forestry management, earth science, urban planning, as well as sports, newscasting, and entertainment | Image Databases Search and Retrieval of Digital Imagery Edited by Vittorio Castelli Lawrence D. Bergman Copyright 2002 John Wiley Sons Inc. ISBNs 0-471-32116-8 Hardback 0-471-22463-4 Electronic 1 Digital Imagery Fundamentals VITTORIO CASTELLI IBM . Watson Research Center Yorktown Heights New York LAWRENCE D. BERGMAN IBM . Watson Research Center Hawthorne New York DIGITAL IMAGERY Digital images have a predominant position among multimedia data types. Unlike video and audio which are mostly used by the entertainment and news industry images are central to a wide variety of fields ranging from art history to medicine including astronomy oil exploration and weather forecasting. Digital imagery plays a valuable role in numerous human activities such as law enforcement agriculture and forestry management earth science urban planning as well as sports newscasting and entertainment. This chapter provides an overview of the topics covered in this book. We first describe several applications of digital imagery some of which are covered in Chapters 2 to 5. The main technological factors that support the management and exchange of digital imagery namely acquisition storage Chapter 6 database management Chapter 7 compression Chapter 8 and transmission Chapter 9 are then discussed. Finally a section has been devoted to content-based retrieval a large class of techniques specifically designed for retrieving images and video. Chapters 10 to 17 cover these topics in detail. APPLICATIONS OF DIGITAL IMAGES Applications of digital imagery are continually developing. In this section some of the major ones have been reviewed and the enabling economical and technological factors have been discussed briefly. Visible Imagery Photographic images are increasingly being acquired stored and transmitted in digital format. Their applications range from personal use to media and advertising education art and even research in the humanities. 1 2 DIGITAL IMAGERY FUNDAMENTALS In
