Proposal IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE Special Issue on Semantic Retrieval of Multimedia There is no doubt that digital media has become an essential element in all aspects of society. Furthermore, the amount of digital media that has been generated and stored, and which continues to do so at an exponential rate, has already become unfathomable. Much vigorous research has focused on the problem of how to efficiently store, search and retrieve digital content and in particular multimedia content, such as images, video and audio. The ease with which this type of content is generated, coupled with its convenience and flexibility, increases the emphasis on the need for its effective access. However, the majority of research up to now has taken a relatively low-level approach to the multimedia indexing and retrieval problem and by default has ignored higher level interpretation and knowledge. Consequently it has become blaringly apparent that low-level approaches are proving to be extremely limiting in making multimedia database systems accessible and useful to end-users. To this end, recent research has begun to focus on bridging the semantic and conceptual gap which exists between man and computer by integrating knowledge-based techniques, human perception and understanding, high-level data interpretation, object classification, psychology, language and semiotics. The objective of the proposed special issue is to review and survey new forward-thinking research and development in intelligent content-based multimedia retrieval technologies. In addition issues pertaining to limitations, sociological issues, future directions and other related work is, of course, also welcome for publication. Tutorial papers are to be solicited from the following non-exhaustive list of topics: Suggested Topics: * Video summarization (e.g., storybooks, skims, structure analysis, scene characterization) * Audio retrieval and classification (e.g., music genre, song matching) * Human-computer interfaces and interaction to retrieval systems (e.g., intuitive interfaces) * Semantic modeling for multimedia retrieval (e.g., language mapping to classified features and objects) * Object classification and retrieval in image databases * Sports and news video analysis and classification * Image database photo album and image storybook generation * Distributed multimedia indexing and retrieval * Storage and accessibility issues (e.g., network infrastructure, hierarchical storage, distributed access) * Database visualization (e.g., statistical modeling) * Information mining for multimedia indexing and retrieval * Existing problems, roadblocks and future trends Submission Procedure: Prospective authors should submit white papers via the website http://www.cspl.umd.edu/spm/ White paper due: March 1, 2005 Invitation notification: March 15, 2005 Manuscript due: July 1, 2005 Acceptance Notification: October 15, 2005 Final Manuscript due: November 15, 2005 Publication date: March 2006 Guest Editors: Anastasios N. Venetsanopoulos Dept. Of Electrical Engineering University of Toronto Toronto, M5S 3G4, CANADA anv@dsp.toronto.edu Dimitrios Androutsos Dept. of Electrical Engineering Ryerson University Toronto, M5B 2K3 CANADA dimitri@ee.ryerson.ca Ling Guan Dept. of Electrical Engineering Ryerson University Toronto, M5B 2K3, CANADA lguan@ee.ryerson.ca