We have witnessed great interest and a wealth of promise in content-based image retrieval as an emerging technology. While the last decade laid foundation to such promise, it also paved the way for a large number of new techniques and systems, got many new people involved, and triggered stronger association of weakly related fields. In this paper, we survey almost 300 key theoretical and empirical contributions in the current decade related to image retrieval and automatic image annotation, and discuss the spawning of related sub-fields in the process. We also discuss significant challenges involved in the adaptation of existing image retrieval techniques to build systems that can be useful in the real-world. In retrospect of what has been achieved so far, we also conjecture what the future may hold for image retrieval research.

This paper surveys the use of Spreading Activation techniques onSemantic Networks in Associative Information Retrieval. The majorSpreading Activation models are presented and their applications toIR is surveyed. A number of works in this area are criticallyanalyzed in order to study the relevance of Spreading Activation forassociative IR. ER -