Machine Vision and Applications (1998) 10: 308–320
Applications
Extracting characters of license plates from video sequences
Yuntao Cui, Qian Huang
Siemens Corporate Research, 755 College Road East, Princeton, NJ 08536, USA; e-mail: {cui,huang}@scr.siemens.com
Received: 13 August 1997 / Accepted: 7 October 1997
Abstract. In this paper, we present a new approach to ex-
tract characters on a license plate of a moving vehicle,
given a sequence of perspective-distortion-corrected license
plate images. Different from many existing single-frame ap-
proaches, our method simultaneously utilizes spatial and
temporal information. We first model the extraction of char-
acters as a Markov random field (MRF), where the random-
ness is used to describe the uncertainty in pixel label assign-
ment. With the MRF modeling, the extraction of characters is
formulated as the problem of maximizing a posteriori prob-
ability based on a given prior knowledge and observations.
A genetic algorithm with local greedy mutation operator is
employed to optimize the objective function. Experiments
and comparison study were conducted and some of our ex-
perimental results are presented in the paper. It is shown that
our approach provides better performance than other single
frame methods.
Key words: Document analysis – Binarization – Image se-
quence analysis
1 Introduction
Automatic recognition of car license plates plays an impor-
tant role in traffic surveillance systems. Recently, we have
seen quite a few computer-vision-based systems that recog-
nize the license plates [2, 8, 9, 13]. Most existing systems
focus on the development of a reliable optical character rec-
ognizer (OCR). However, prior to the recognition an OCR
system performs, the characters have to be extracted from
license plates. To simplify the extraction problem, the exist-
ing systems assume that a license plate is a rectangular area
containing a number of dark characters on a white back-
ground. With this assumption, various approaches exist that
extract characters using global threshold methods [8, 9, 13]
with sometimes global contrast enhancement prior to the ex-
traction [2]. Unfortunately, these methods do not work well
in most real applications because of the following factors: 1)
Correspondence to: Y. Cui
Machine Vision and
c Springer-Verlag 1998
low resolution of the characters on the plate due to the appli-
cation requirement that the entire car has to be visible in the
image; 2) global thresholding or enhancement methods work
well only when the plate is uniformly illuminated and not
too noisy, which usually is not the case in real applications.
Takahashi et al. [19] proposed a morphology-based thresh-
olding method to improve the performance in extracting
characters from license plates. They viewed a character to
be the combinations of “ditches”, where a ditch is formed by
two edges with opposite direction. Then, they designed ap-
propriate morphological operators to enhance the area within
the ditch (between two edges). Although this method is suit-
able in the case when the contrast between the character and
the background is strong, it is very difficult to pick up the
correct locations of edges in low-contrast images, a situation
often occurs in real applications.
Another set of solutions to extract the characters of a
license plate is to use adaptive thresholding (see [20] for
a survey of binarization methods). Unlike global methods,
adaptive approaches find the thresholds based on the infor-
mation from local regions. Therefore, they are capable of
dealing with non-uniformly illuminated license plate images.
However, the performance of these adaptive thresholding
methods depends on the selection of the local regions. An-
other problem is that these methods tend to generate broken
characters as a single character may belong to different local
regions that have different local thresholds. To deal with this
problem, some algorithms apply region growing to fill the
holes [11, 23].
Another alternative to improve the extraction is to use
additional data constraints from multiple frames. Multiframe
methods have been shown to be effective in image restora-
tion tasks [16, 21]. In this paper, we address the issue of
extracting characters by simultaneously utilizing spatial and
temporal information. In our approach, the extraction of
characters from license plate images is modeled as a 3D
Markov random field (MRF), where the randomness is used
to describe the uncertainty in the label assignment of pix-
els. As a result, the prior knowledge which promotes the
consistency between adjacent pixels can be represented in
terms of the clique functions associated with the underlying
Gibbs probability distribution function (pdf) describing the
 309

MRF. Under the MRF modeling assumption, the extraction

problem can be formulated as an optimization problem of B1 B2
maximizing the a posteriori probability given prior knowl-
edge and observations. Then, a genetic algorithm with local
greedy mutation operator is employed to optimize the ob-
jective function. B3 B4
The paper is organized as follows. In Sect. 2, we use the
MRF model to formulate the character extraction problem
Fig. 1. A four-node clique
as an optimization problem. Then, we apply a genetic algo-
rithm with our local greedy mutation operator in Sect. 3 to
optimize the objective function. Section 4 is related to the
preprocessing of how to extract license plates from images
in a sequence. In Sect. 5, we show the experimental results.
Finally, we draw our conclusions in Sect. 6.
Localize the plate of one image
2 The MRF-model-based character extraction
The MRF model, as an extension of the one-dimensional
Markov process, has attracted much attention in the image
processing and computer vision community (e.g., [3, 4]).
MRF models can be used to incorporate prior contextual Extract feature points from the plate
information or constraints in a quantitative way. Local spa-
tial/contextual dependencies can be utilized to perform bi-
narization [7]. Another advantage of the MRF-model is that
it tends to be local, hence it is suitable for parallel hardware
implementation. In this section, we present an MRF model- Track the feature points
based approach to extract characters from multiple frames.
The model combines the prior knowledge and observations
from both spatial and temporal dimensions into a unified
framework.
Estimate motion parameters
2.1 Problem statement
Our problem is to extract characters from a moving vehicle.
Such extracted results can be fed into an OCR to perform
automatic recognition. The developed approach can be used Correct the perspective distortion
in many applications, including automatic traffic violation
control, automatic parking lot billing, etc.. Formally, assume
yl be the lth frame which contains a license plate, where l =
{1, 2, · · · , n}. Our goal is to extract one rectangular image
Fig. 2. The diagram of the plate localization and the correction of the
I of the license plate with size N1 × N2 . Each pixel zi,j ∈ I perspective distortion
is labeled either as 1 (on the character) or 0 (background
pixel).
2.3 The MRF model
2.2 Motion model
After correction of the perspective distortion, we have a
Multiple frames of license plates are obtained during differ- stack of equally sized license plate images, based on which,
ent time intervals. Since the vehicle is moving and the view we intend to obtain I using and MRF-model-based approach.
of camera is not necessarily perpendicular to the incoming Let S be a finite set of N1 × N2 sites. Consider z to be a
vehicle, the license plates from different frames have not binary random field and g = {gi,j , (i, j) ∈ S} to be a neigh-
only different size but also different perspective distortion. borhood system on S, such that
The first thing we need to do is transform each license plate
y(l) to a rectangular image fl with size N1 × N2 . For any 1. (i, j) is not in gi,j ,
l
pixel yi,j on yl , we can map it onto fil0 ,j 0 using a planar 2. (i, j) ∈ gk,l , if and only if (k, l) ∈ gi,j , for all (i, j), (k, l) ∈
surface motion model [1], where S.
i0 = i + p1 i + p2 j + p5 + p7 i2 + p8 ij , We say z is an MRF with respect to g if and only if [4]:
j 0 = j + p3 i + p4 j + p6 + p7 ij + p8 j 2 . (1) 1. P (z = s) > 0, for any realization s of z,
The coefficients pi can be solved if four correspondences 2. P (zi,j = si,j |zk,l = sk,l , (i, j) =
/ (k, l)) = P (zi,j =
are available. We will discuss this in detail in Sect. 4. si,j |zk,l = sk,l , (k, l) ∈ gi,j ),
310

Fig. 3. Five images of a moving vehicle

where P (·) and P (·|·) are the joint and conditional pdfs, where
respectively. X
An important feature of the MRF model is that its joint U (s) = Vc (s) (3)
c∈C
pdf has a general form, known as the Gibbs distribution
defined based on the concept of cliques [4]. A clique is a is the Gibbs energy function and Vc (s) is called the clique
subset C ⊆ S if and only if every pair of distinct sites in C potential, T is the “temperature” parameter. Finally,
are neighbors. Another important feature of the MRF model X 0
is that z is an MRF on S with respect to the neighborhood Z= exp−U (s )/T (4)
system g if and only if the probability distribution is a Gibbs all s0
distribution based on the cliques. A Gibbs distribution can is the normalization factor. Notice that the preceding MRF
be represented as follows: pdf is quite rich in that the clique functions can be arbitrary
as long as they depend only on the nodes in the correspond-
1 ing cliques. Therefore, the MRF-model-based approach pro-
P (s) = exp−U (s)/T , (2) vides potential advantages in the problem of the character
Z
 311

Table 1. Clique energies

Configuration of B1 B2 B3 B4 Energy

0000 1.0
0001 6.0
0010 6.0
0011 3.0
0100 6.0
0101 3.0
0110 18.0
0111 6.0
1000 1.0
1001 18.0
1010 3.0
1011 6.0
1100 3.0
1101 6.0
Fig. 4. The results of the localization is shown using white rectangular
1110 6.0
1111 1.0

extraction, for example, we can define the clique functions to

promote the consistence of the labeling between neighboring
pixels.

2.4 The MRF-model-based formulation

We formulate the character extraction from multiframes as

a Bayesian MAP estimation problem. The MAP estimate is
at the maximum of the posterior probability P (z|{fl }), or
equivalently, at the maximum of the log-likelihood function
z = arg max log P (z|f1 , f2 , · · · , fn ). (5)
fl Fig. 5. The top 30 features within the license plate region
Applying Bayes’ theorem, we have
z = arg max{log P (z) + log P (f1 , f2 , · · · , fn |z)}. (6) where N is a zero mean white Gaussian random field with
fl
variance σl for each variable in N. Then, we have
The prior probability can be written as kz−zl k2
1 −
1 P (fl |z) = exp 2σ 2
l , (10)
P (z = s) = exp−U (s)/T 2
(2πσl ) N1 N2 /2
Z
X
U (s) = Vc (s) (7) for l = {1, 2, · · · , n}. Incorporate the prior and the condi-
c∈C
tional density into Eq. 6, we have
X n
X
The parameter T is assumed to be 1 for simplicity. Here, kz − zl k2
the clique energies are chosen to encourage the consistence z = arg min{ Vc (z) + }. (11)
z
c∈C l=1
2σl2
of the labeling between neighboring pixels. Encouragement
or discouragement is done by assigning some energy values The above objective function is not well behaved. Many
with a clique. We use a four node clique as shown in Fig. 1. gradient-based techniques cannot be applied here since the
For the extraction problem, each pixel Bi on the clique function is not differentiable. The genetic algorithm (GA)
is assigned either 1 or 0. Therefore, B1 B2 B3 B4 is a hex- is an adaptive search algorithm based on the mechanics of
adecimal number which has 16 different choices. Table 1 natural selection and natural genetics [5]. GA requires only
shows one set of energy which was used in the experiments. objective function values to perform an effective search. This
The observation between frames is assumed to be in- characteristic makes a GA a more canonical method than
dependent, so that the complete conditional density can be many other search schemes.
written as
n
Y
n
P (f , f , · · · , f |z) =
1 2
P (fl |z). (8) 3 Optimization using GA
l=1
GAs were introduced by Holland [6] as a computational
Let zl be the extraction result based on the single frame l.
analog of adaptive systems. Given the objective function
Assume the observation model is given by
(11), GAs can be used to find solution zi to minimize
z = zl + N, (9) the fitness value g(zi ). With GAs, a set of fixed size is
312
Fig. 6. The tracking results
prepared, called a population, consisting of M individuals
zi = zi,1 zi,2 · · · zi,N1 ×N2 , where zi,j = 0, 1. The fitness func-
tion g is used to evaluate individuals.
3.1 Simple GA
A simple GA is composed of three operators:
1. Selection. It is a process in which individuals are re-
produced according to their fitness values. Intuitively,
we would like to duplicate the individuals whose fitness
values are lower with higher probability for our minimiz-
ing problem. The probability of an individual zi being
reproduced in the next generation is defined as
1/g(zi )
Pzi = PM . (12)
j=1 (1/g(zj ))
2. Crossover. It selects two individuals from the current
population with a probability χ. Then, it mates them by
exchanging the 1 ≤ l ≤ N1 × N2 right-most bits of the
two individuals, where the number of the exchanged bits,
l, is chosen uniformly at random from [1, N1 × N2 ].
Fig. 7. The results of the mapping
3. Mutation. Given a mutation probability µ, randomly
choose an individual from the population and position,
and then invert the bit.
3.2 Greedy mutation operator
In the simple GA, the fittest individual in a population is
not guaranteed to survive into the next generation, and thus
an extremely good solution to the fitness function may be
discovered and subsequently lost. One way to avoid this
problem is to use elitist selection in which the best individ-
ual in the population survives with probability one [15, 18].
Since the simple GA runs with a non-zero mutation rate, it is
trivial to show that a global optimum will be reached when
the GA is left to run infinitely. However, the crossover and
mutation operators randomly explore the solution space in
the simple GAs. The random search is not very efficient and
it makes the GAs converge very slowly, especially when the
entire solution space is large, like our case. In this paper, we
use a local greedy mutation operator to speed up the con-
 313

Fig. 8. The results of the character extraction using Park’s

method

Fig. 9. The results of the character extraction using Yanowitz

and Bruckstein’s method

the objective function. A simple probabilistic Markov chain

Fig. 10. The result after 20 iterations
vergence. Let zi,j be the bit selected to flip. We define the
local greedy flip probability P f to be

µ1 if g(zi ) < g(z0i )
Pf = , (13)
µ2 otherwise
where z0i is zi with the jth bit flipped and µ1 > µ2 > 0.
A non-zero µ2 is necessary to prevent the GA from being
stuck on the local minima. Due to the localalism of both
the prior (cliques) and the conditional density, only a few
local pixels are needed to compute the difference between
g(zi ) and g(z0i ). This greedy mutation operator utilizes the
problem information, thus making the solution search more
efficient.
3.3 Expected convergence rate
with the greedy mutation operator
Let l = N1 × N2 be the length of the binary strings, then
r = 2l is the total number of possible strings. If n is the
population size, then the number of possible populations N
is [10]
 
n+r−1
N= . (14)
n j=1
As can be seen, even for a relatively small image 64×64, N
can be very large. So, with the random crossover and mu-
tation operators, the GAs converge very slowly. The greedy
is adopted to model the behavior of the algorithm. Consider
a stochastic process {zi , i = 0, 1, 2, · · · , N }. If zn = i, then
the process is said to be in state i at time n. We assume that,
whenever the process is in state i, there is a fixed probability
Pi,j that it will be in state j. Such a stochastic process is
known as a Markov chain [14].
Theorem 1. Let E be a simple greedy problem and N be
the number of possible populations. The expected generation
number that the GA population will contain a copy of the
optimum is O(log N ) when the greedy mutation probability
µ1 = 1.0 and the crossover probability χ = 0.0.
Proof. Since E is a simple greedy problem, at any time
the population has jth best solution, then after the greedy
mutation, the population should have a better solution. As-
sume that the new solution is equally likely to be any of
the j − 1 best. This can be modeled by a Markov chain for
which P1,1 = 1 and
1
Pi,j = , (15)
i−1
where j = 1, 2, · · · , i−1, i > 1. Let Ti denote the number of
transitions needed to go from state i to state 1. A recursive
formula for E(Ti ) can be obtained by conditioning on the
initial transition:
i−1
1 X
E(Ti ) = 1 + E(Tj )
i−1
i−1
X
= 1/j. (16)
j=1

mutation operator which utilizes the problem information Since

is expected to be more efficient. In this section, we use a Z N N −1 Z N −1
Markov chain model to see how the greedy mutation oper- dx X dx
< 1/j < 1 + (17)
ator moves in the solution space and answer the following 1 x 1 x
1
question: what is the expected generation number that the
GA population will contain a copy of the optimum. The or
closed form analysis is difficult in general. Here, we con- N
X −1
sider a type of problems called simple greedy problems. log N < 1/j < 1 + log(N − 1), (18)
1
Definition 1. Let zi be a realization in the solution space of
a problem E, which is defined to minimize g(zi ). If, for any and so
zi , there exists a j such that g(z0i ) < g(zi ), where z0i is zi with E(Ti ) = O(log N ). (19)
the jth bit flipped, then P is a simple greedy problem.
Theorem 1 indicates that the greedy mutation converges
For a simple greedy problem, we can use the greedy much faster than random search for simple greedy problems.
mutation operator, where µ1 = 1.0 and χ = 0.0, to minimize What if the problem is not a simple greedy problem? This
314
Fig. 11. Five images of the second sequence of a moving vehicle
means that the search is stuck in a situation in which a single
flip cannot minimize the objective function. In that case, we
have to use a non-zero µ2 to pull out from the local minima.
Once it is out of the local minima, we can continue to apply
the greedy mutation operations.
4 License plate localization and distortion correction
Prior to applying our algorithm to extract characters from
the license plates, we first have to localize the license plate
in each frame of a sequence and then to warp them to a
fixed-size window by correcting the perspective distortion.
Figure 2 illustrates the scheme of the plate localization and
the correction of the perspective distortion.
In this scheme, we first localize the license plate in an
image. Next, we identify distinct point features from the
detected license plate region. The feature points are tracked
in subsequent frames. Based on tracked correspondences,
warping parameters can be computed and used to map all
the detected license plate to specified windows of fixed size.
4.1 Localization of the license plate
We assume that region of the license plate consists of dark
characters on top of a light background. The localization of

Fig. 11. (continued) Experimental results of the second sequence. a The extracted license plates of third
sequence. b The results of the character extraction using Park’s method. c The results of Yanowitz and
d Bruckstein’s method. d The result after 20 iterations of our method
the license plate can be considered as finding text in images.
In our current implementation, we use the spatial variance
method proposed by Zhong et al. [24] to locate the text
region in the input image. The main idea of this method can
be explained as follows. If we compute the spatial variance
along the line of the license plate direction, we see that the
regions with high variance corresponding to the text region,
and regions with low variance corresponding to the non-text
region. Given the fact that the camera is mounted at a fixed
position, we roughly know what area in the image the license
plates should appear which is independent of the motion of
vehicles. Additionally, the range of the size of license plates
can be used to discard some spurious detections.
4.2 Feature extraction
For each pixel in the detected text region, we compute its
feature using a window of size 5 × 5. Shi and Tomasi’s [17]
method was used. Let (x, y) be a pixel location within a
detected text region and Ix (x, y) and Iy (x, y) be its partial
derivatives. At each pixel, we have a matrix whose elements
are sums of the products of the partial derivatives taken in
a 5 × 5 window.
 P P 
Ix2 (x, y) IP
x (x, y)Iy (x, y)
A= P . (20)
Ix (x, y)Iy (x, y) Iy2 (x, y)
The second eigenvalue of this matrix is used as the rank at
pixel (x, y). Across the entire text region, we use this rank to
rate all the pixels. Currently, the top 30 among all such rated
pixels are chosen to be the set of features that represents the
text region and will be tracked along the sequence.
315
4.3 Feature tracking
We assume that vehicles are moving along the road. The
trajectories of points on the license plates are parallel in
3D space. These parallel trajectories have the same vanish-
ing point in the image plane [12]. Let V = (Vx , Vy ) be the
vanishing point in the image plane and P = {(xi , yi )|i =
1, 2, · · · , n} be the points at the current frame. Our goal is
find t,r,c, such that
n
X
(kI(xi , yi ) − I(x0i + r, yi0 + c)k2
i=1
+kG(xi , yi ) − G(x0i + r, yi0 + r)k2 ) (21)
is minimized. Here,
x0i = Vx + (1 − t)xi ,
yi0 = Vy + (1 − t)yi . (22)
Here, I is the intensity and G is the gradient. Both intensity
and edgeness are used in the tracking as described in [22].
Conditions −3 ≤ r ≤ 3 and −3 ≤ c ≤ 3 are used to
do some local refinement in the case where the vehicle has
slight direction change and the vanish point estimation has
errors. The search of the solution is unidirectional and very
fast.
4.4 Correction of the perspective distortion
Tracked feature points provide correspondences needed to
solve motion parameters. Since license plates are planar ob-
jects, we need only to solve for warping parameters in or-
der to correct perspective distortion of different frames. The
planar surface motion model is described in Sect. 2.2. Us-
ing warping parameters, we map all the license plate images
onto fixed-sized rectangular windows, providing a stack of
license plate images for the MRF-model-based character ex-
traction mechanism.
316
Fig. 12. Six images of the third sequence of a moving vehicle
5 Experimental results
We implemented our MRF-model-based approach to extract
characters from image sequences. The sequences of the mov-
ing vehicles were obtained from a stationary video camera.
The experimental results from three different sequences are
shown and discussed here. These sequences are representa-
tive, because they vary in terms of the resolution of the
license plate images and the illumination conditions. We
show them in a descending order, which means the first
sequence is the best in terms of the resolution and the illu-
mination conditions and the third is the worst. For compari-
son, we also show the results obtained using Park’s [11] and
Yanowitz and Bruckstein’s [23] methods. These two meth-
ods are among the best according to [20].
Figure 3 shows five images of the first sequence of a
moving vehicle.
The top 30 features of Fig. 4 are shown in Fig. 5.
The tracking results are shown in Fig. 6.
The tracking results were used to compute the motion
parameters. These motion parameters were then used to cor-
rect the perspective distortion. After perspective correction,
we have a stack of equally sized license plate images as
shown in Fig. 7.
Now, we are ready to apply our algorithm to extract the
characters from the sequence of rectangular frames. Park’s
 317

Fig. 12. (continued) Experimental results of the third sequence. a The extracted license plates of third
sequence. b The results of the character extraction using Park’s method. c The results of Yanowitz and
d Bruckstein’s method. d The result after 20 iterations of our method

[11] method was used to extract the characters from each
individual frame. The results are shown in Fig. 8. We also
show the results of Yanowitz and Bruckstein’s [23] method
in Fig. 9.
In the current implementation, we set the mutation prob-
ability µ1 = 0.9 and µ2 = 0.01 and the crossover probability
χ = 0.001. We use µ1 = 0.9 instead of µ1 = 1.0 to avoid the
oscillation between two individual bits. The population size
was 100. The use of the greedy mutation operator makes
convergence very fast. Figure 10 shows the result after 20
generations. The result is clearly better than both Park’s and
Yanowitz and Bruckstein’s single-frame methods. Yanowitz
and Bruckstein’s method generates the thin skeletons of the
characters, but also has quite a few noises because of spu-
rious edges generated by the edge detector. The size of the
plate image is 40 × 280. The block size which we use for
Park’s method is 40 × 35, which is roughly the size of one
character in the plate.
The next two sequences have poorer resolutions of the
license plate images and the illumination conditions are also
worse than in the first sequence. Same procedures were ap-
plied to these two sequences. Figures 11 and 12 show the
results. The third sequence has very poor resolutions and il-
lumination conditions. Both Park’s and Yanowitz and Bruck-
stein’s methods failed. However, our method still gives rea-
sonable results.
318
Fig. 13. Five images of a moving vehicle
Finally, we applied our approach to extract the numbers
from containers. A sequence of images of a container is
shown in Fig. 13. The results are shown in Fig. 13a–d.
6 Conclusions
In this paper, we present a new approach to extract charac-
ters from license plates given a sequence of images. In our
approach, the extraction of characters from license plate im-
ages is modeled as an MRF, where the randomness is used
to model the uncertainty in the assignment of the pixels. As a
result, the prior knowledge which promotes the consistency
between adjacent pixels can be represented in terms of the
clique functions associated with the underlying Gibbs pdf
describing the MRF. Under the MRF modeling assumption,
extraction is then formulated as the optimization problem of
maximizing the a posteriori probability given prior knowl-
edge and observations. Then, a genetic algorithm with local
greedy mutation operator is employed to optimize the ob-
jective function. Our experimental results have shown better
performance than other single-frame methods.
By using the greedy mutation operator, we can dramat-
ically reduce the computation cost. However, it is still far
from the real-time requirement. Fortunately, the evaluation
of our objective function is local, and it is suitable for par-
allel hardware implementation.

Fig. 13. (continued) Experimental results of the second sequence. a The extracted container numbers. b The results of
the character extraction using Park’s method. c The results of Yanowitz and Bruckstein’s method. d The result after 20
d iterations of our method
Acknowledgements. We would like to thank Dr. Shang-Hong Lai for sug-
gestions on MRF and GAs, and Dr. Marie-Pierre M. Jolly for providing us
the codes of Yanowitz and Bruckstein’s method.
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Yuntao Cui received his BS degree
from Shanghai Jiao Tong University
in 1988, MS degree from Southeastern
Massachusetts University in 1991, and
PhD from Michigan State University in
1996, all in Computer Science. He is
currently with Siemens Corporate Re-
search, Inc., Princeton, NJ. His current
research interests are video processing
applications for surveillance, multime-
dia, and visualization.
Qian Huang got her BS degree in
Computer Engineering from Shanghai,
China. She obtained her MS degree in
both computer science and industrial
engineering from Kansas State Univer-
sity. Dr Huang’s PhD is in the domain
of computer vision and pattern recog-
nition from Michigan State University.
Her current research interests include
real time video processing, content based
visual information archiving, indexing,
and retrieval, new media systems, and
integration of visual and non-visual in-
formation in multimedia applications.