Jennifer Trant
Executive Director
Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO)
The rapid increase in the quantity of visual materials in digital libraries–supported by significant advances in digital imaging technologies–has not been accompanied by a corresponding advance in image retrieval technologies and techniques. Digital Librarians are currently without tools for evaluating either content-based or metadata-based image retrieval systems. They have difficulty assessing existing systems of image access, evaluating proposed changes, or comparing metadata-based to content-based image retrieval. Benchmarking has been proposed as a possible solution to this problem of comparison. CLIR and CNI have supported the exploration of these issues.
This session will report on the activities of the CLIR/CNI project to date. We’ll review the components of a possible Image Retrieval Benchmarking Service and explore the strategies that might serve to develop the service and a community of researchers whose work would ultimately improve digital library service.