Images, music, video, and 3D scenes play a crucial role in Visual Information Systems and Multimedia. There is an extraordinary number of applications of such systems in entertainment, business, art, engineering, and science. Such applications often involve huge collections of media, so that efficient and effective searching in databases of these media is an important operation.

The emphasis of this fourth seminar lies on the PERCEPTUAL and COGNITIVE aspects of all kinds of content-based retrieval. Fundamental questions such as the role of perception and cognition in feature extraction, pattern similarity rating, indexing large collections etc. play an important role.

We strongly believe that content based retrieval needs an integrated approach from fields such as image processing, shape processing, psychology, database indexing, visualization, querying, etc. The purpose of this seminar is to bring together people from the various fields in order to promote information exchange and interaction among researchers who are interested in various aspects of accessing the content of images, music, video, and 3D data.

For this seminar, we have invited internationally known as well as young researchers from various disciplines with a common interest in content-based multimedia retrieval. We have been together with a group of 26 researchers for a week, away from the rest of the world, and certainly good interaction and exchange of ideas took place during the sessions as well as in the very "gemütliche" wine cellar, enjoying the cheese platter.

There was a total of 26 presentations, a demonstration session, and a discussion session. The discussion session was about the challenges we face in the coming phases of research in content-based retrieval; to a large extent this discussion was about common problems, especially in the difficulty of evaluation, across all the domains represented at this seminar – we hope that some common solutions will present themselves before too long. The presentations in this seminar can be grouped thematically as follows:

• At a cross-media level, there were presentations about indexing and web issues
• On 3D model retrieval related topics
• The presentations related to music retrieval
• A number of presentations were on video and motion retrieval
• The other presentations were largely in the area of image retrieval