In this introduction, we present a brief state of the art of multimedia indexing and retrieval as well as highlight some notions explored in the special issue. We hope that the contributions of this special issue will present ingredients for further investigations on this ever challenging domain. The special issue is actually situated between old problems and new challenges, and contribute to understand the next multimedia indexing and retrieval generation. The contributions explore wide range of fields such as signal processing, data mining and information retrieval.

The evaluation process has involved three review stages to update the papers. We are grateful to the authors for their hard work and patience during this long period of the special issue preparation. The special issue would not be possible without the great effort and reactions of the authors and reviewers.

Here is the list of the program committee members involved in the special issue reviewing process:

Régine André-Obrecht (IRIT, Toulouse), Michel Barlaud (I3S, Sophia-Antipolis), Jenny Benois-Pineau (LABRI, Bordeaux), Catherine Berrut (CLIPS-IMAG, Grenoble), Frédéric Bimbot (IRISA, Rennes), Nozha Boujemaa (INRIA, Rocquencourt), Jean-Cedric Chappelier (EPFL, Lausanne), Chabane Djeraba (LIFL, Lille), Chalapathy Neti (IBM Research), Arjen P. De Vries (CWI, Amsterdam), Alberto Del Bimbo (University of Florence), Nevenka Dimitrova (Philips Research), Gregory Grefenstette (Clairvoyance Corp., Pittsburgh), Patrick Gros (IRISA, Rennes), Benoît Huet (Eurecom, Sophia-Antipolis), Ebroul Izquierdo (QMUL, London), Jean-Michel Jolion (INSA, Lyon), Philippe Joly (IRIT, Toulouse), Riccardo Leonardi (University of Brescia), Benoît Macq (UCL, Louvain-La-Neuve), Stéphane Marchand-Maillet (University of Geneva), Ferran Marques (UPC, Barcelona), Philippe Mulhem (IPAL, National University of Singapore), François Pachet (Sony Research France), Fernando Pereira (IST, Lisbon), Ioannis Pitas (AUT, Thessaloniki), Françoise Prêteux (INT, Evry), Gael Richard (Telecom, Paris), Sin'ichi Satoh (NII, Tokyo), Arnold Smeulders (University of Amsterdam), Michael Strintzis (ITI, Thessaloniki), Murat Tekalp (University of Rochester), Nuno Vasconcelos (HP Cambridge Research Lab), Hong-Jiang Zhang (Microsoft Research, Beijing), Mohamed Daoudi (University of Tours), Christophe Chaillou (LIFL, Lille), Nicu Sebe (University of Amsterdam) and Michael Lew (Leiden University).

Authors and Affiliations

1. LIFL—UMR CNRS-USTL 8022-Building M3, University of Lille 1, 59655, Villeneuve d’Ascq, Cedex, France

   Chabane Djeraba

2. Tampere University of Technology, Institute of Signal Processing, P.O. Box 553, FIN-33101, Tampere, Finland

   Moncef Gabbouj

3. IRISA / INRIA Rennes Campus Universitaire de Beaulieu, 35042, Rennes, Cedex, France

   Patrick Bouthemy

Corresponding author

Correspondence toChabane Djeraba.

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