The Continuing Reinvention of Content-Based Retrieval: Multimedia Is Not Dead

In reviewing how content-based retrieval has evolved over the years, the authors argue that the next grand challenge for the multimedia community will be understanding and formally modeling the flow of life around us, over many modalities and scales. This will require supplementing generic signal/sensor-based retrieval with syntactical, semantic, and pragmatics-based approaches. To determine whether a data-driven approach supports their observations regarding the evolution of content-based retrieval, the authors examine the types of research reported at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia from 2005 to 2015.