In this chapter we present an overview of data fusion, and how it can be
applied to the task of internet multimedia search, specifically content-based multimedia
search. The chapter will primarily be focused on the weighted combination
of ranked results from different retrieval experts, to formulate a final ranking for
some given content-based information need. The types of data under examination
in this chapter are low-level multimedia features, such as colour histograms, edge
detection etc. The chapter reports an extensive series of experiments on a sizable
collection of visual media and from these experiments a set of interesting and
surprising results emerge.
Keywords: Data fusion, Query optimization, CBMIR, Image Retrieval, Video Retrieval,
Evaluation, TRECVID, ImageCLEF, Multimodal, Query by example