Introduction

With the explosion of video and image data available on the Internet, desktops and mobile devices, multimedia search has gained immense importance. Moreover, mining semantics and other useful information from large-scale multimedia data to facilitate online and local multimedia content analysis, search, and other related applications has also gained an increasing attention from the academia and industry. The rapid increase of multimedia data has brought new challenges to multimedia content analysis and multimedia retrieval, especially in terms of scalability. While on the other hand, large-scale multimedia data has also provided new opportunities to address these challenges and other conventional problems in multimedia analysis. The massive associated metadata, context and social information available on the Internet, desktops and mobile devices, and the large number of grassroots users, are a valuable resource that could be leveraged to solve the these difficulties. This is the first reference book on the subject of internet multimedia search and mining and it will be extremely useful for graduates, researchers and working professionals in the field of information technology and multimedia content analysis.