  In the last years we witness a dramatic growth of research focused on
semantic image understanding. Indeed, without understanding image content
successful accomplishment of any image-processing task is simply incredible. Up
to the recent times, the ultimate need for such understanding has been met by
the knowledge that a domain expert or a vision system supervisor have
contributed to every image-processing application. The advent of the Internet
has drastically changed this situation. Internet sources of visual information
are diffused and dispersed over the whole Web, so the duty of information
content discovery and evaluation must be relegated now to an image
understanding agent (a machine or a computer program) capable to perform image
content assessment at a remote image location. Development of Content Based
Image Retrieval (CBIR) techniques was a right move in a right direction,
launched about ten years ago. Unfortunately, very little progress has been made
since then. The reason for this can be seen in a rank of long lasting
misconceptions that CBIR designers are continuing to adhere to. I hope, my
arguments will help them to change their minds.
