  The growth of multimedia collections - in terms of size, heterogeneity, and
variety of media types - necessitates systems that are able to conjointly deal
with several forms of media, especially when it comes to searching for
particular objects. However, existing retrieval systems are organized in silos
and treat different media types separately. As a consequence, retrieval across
media types is either not supported at all or subject to major limitations. In
this paper, we present vitrivr, a content-based multimedia information
retrieval stack. As opposed to the keyword search approach implemented by most
media management systems, vitrivr makes direct use of the object's content to
facilitate different types of similarity search, such as Query-by-Example or
Query-by-Sketch, for and, most importantly, across different media types -
namely, images, audio, videos, and 3D models. Furthermore, we introduce a new
web-based user interface that enables easy-to-use, multimodal retrieval from
and browsing in mixed media collections. The effectiveness of vitrivr is shown
on the basis of a user study that involves different query and media types. To
the best of our knowledge, the full vitrivr stack is unique in that it is the
first multimedia retrieval system that seamlessly integrates support for four
different types of media. As such, it paves the way towards an all-purpose,
content-based multimedia information retrieval system.
