This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Visual Information Systems, VISUAL'99, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in June 1999. The 100 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The book is divided into topical sections on visual information systems, interactive visual query, Internet search engines, video parsing, spatial data, visual languages, features and indexes for image retrieval, object retrieval, ranking and performance, shape retrieval, retrieval systems, image compression, virtual environments, recognition systems, and visualization systems.