1 Image Acquisition , Storage and Retrieval

In many areas of commerce, government, academia, hospitals, and homes, large collections of digital images are being created. However, in order to make use of it, the data should be organized for efficient searching and retrieval. An image retrieval system is a computer system for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large database of digital images. Due to diversity in content and increase in the size of the image collections, annotation became both ambiguous and laborious. With this, the focus shifted to Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), in which images are indexed according to their visual content. The chapter will provide mathematical foundations and practical techniques for digital manipulation of images; image acquisition; image storage and image retrieval. Image databases have particular requirements and characteristics, the most important of which will be outlined in this Section.