Beckman Institute researcher Tom Huang and his co-authors recently received the “Most Cited Paper of the Decade Award” from the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation.

The paper, Image Retrieval: Current Techniques, Promising Directions, and Open Issues was authored by Huang, his student at the time, Yong Rui, and collaborator Shih-Fu Chang of Columbia University. It has been cited 564 times in the journal and more than 1,000 times in Google Scholar since first appearing in 1999.

In announcing the award, the journal’s publishers write that the Most Cited Paper of the Decade Award “offers an alternative to committee-selected ‘best papers’. The only objective and transparent metric that is highly correlated with the quality of a paper is the number of citations.”

Huang, who is Co-chair of Beckman’s Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction research theme, has published more than 21 books and 600 papers in his research areas of image processing and computer vision. Rui is currently a Director at the Microsoft China Research group while Chang is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia.  

The publishers write this of the paper: “It is evident that this work has been especially valuable to the community. We congratulate Drs. Rui, Huang, and Chang for this great achievement.”

According to the authors, the paper was published during a crossroads in the area of multimedia search and retrieval. Since its publication, it has guided research, including the establishment of a new and still highly active research area called relevance feedback in image retrieval. The research has led to four focused topics: human factor and relevance feedback, Web scale media search, performance evaluations and standard datasets, and integration of disciplines and media, all of which remain key focus topics for researchers in the field.