This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Visual Information Systems, VISUAL 2000, held in Lyon, France in November 2000. The 37 revised full papers presented together with eight posters and two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on image information systems, video information systems, visual querying, color, shape-based retrieval, image databases, video indexing, image retrieval, and bench marking.