Multimedia Indexing, Search, and Retrieval in Large Databases of Social Networks

Social networks are changing the way multimedia content is shared on the web, by allowing users to upload their photos, videos, and audio content, produced by any means of digital recorders such as mobile/smart-phones, and web/digital cameras. This plethora of content created the need for finding the desired media in the social media universe. Moreover, the diversity of the available content, inspired users to demand and formulate more complicated queries. In the social media era, multimedia content search is promoted to a fundamental feature towards efficient search inside social multimedia streams, content classification, context and event based indexing. In this chapter an overview of multimedia indexing and searching algorithms, following the data growth curve is presented in detail. The chapter is thematically structured in two parts. In the first part pure multimedia content retrieval issues are presented, while in the second part, the social aspects and new, interesting views on multimedia retrieval in the large social media databases are discussed.