This is one of a few dozen papers appearing in another of Morgan Kaufmann Publishers’ excellent “Readings in...” books. The book itself is heavy, with several hundred pages of paper reprints collected together and organized into chapters, with a commentary and overview by the editors preceding each chapter. The series provides an excellent service to the community, especially for those who wish to move into a new area of interest, in that it quickly allows one to familiarize oneself with the evolution and development of a topic over time.

The particular paper in question, first published in 1991, is one of the earliest papers to use color histograms derived from images, for indexing such images into a database to allow subsequent content-based operations. Since the time of its initial publication, however, the whole area of image retrieval has moved on quite considerably, and the related area of indexing and retrieval directly from digital video has emerged from nowhere and is becoming topical. Thus the value of this paper as a direct source of contemporary approaches is naturally somewhat diminished. However, it is a well-chosen example of background work in this field.