Image-based Recommendations on Styles and Substitutes

Humans inevitably develop a sense of the relationships between objects, some of which are based on their appearance. Some pairs of objects might be seen as being alternatives to each other (such as two pairs of jeans), while others may be seen as being complementary (such as a pair of jeans and a matching shirt). This information guides many of the choices that people make, from buying clothes to their interactions with each other. We seek here to model this human sense of the relationships between objects based on their appearance. Our approach is not based on fine-grained modeling of user annotations but rather on capturing the largest dataset possible and developing a scalable method for uncovering human notions of the visual relationships within. We cast this as a network inference problem defined on graphs of related images, and provide a large-scale dataset for the training and evaluation of the same. The system we develop is capable of recommending which clothes and accessories will go well together (and which will not), amongst a host of other applications.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, SIGIR 201

Beyond 2D-grids: a dependence maximization view on image browsing

Ideally, one would like to perform image search using an intuitive and friendly approach. Many existing image search engines, however, present users with sets of images arranged in some default order on the screen, typically the relevance to a query, only. While this certainly has its advantages, arguably, a more flexible and intuitive way would be to sort images into arbitrary structures such as grids, hierarchies, or spheres so that images that are visually or semantically alike are placed together. This paper focuses on designing such a navigation system for image browsers. This is a challenging task because arbitrary layout structure makes it difficult -- if not impossible -- to compute cross-similarities between images and structure coordinates, the main ingredient of traditional layouting approaches. For this reason, we resort to a recently developed machine learning technique: kernelized sorting. It is a general technique for matching pairs of objects from different domains without requiring cross-domain similarity measures and hence elegantly allows sorting images into arbitrary structures. Moreover, we extend it so that some images can be preselected for instance forming the tip of the hierarchy allowing to subsequently navigate through the search results in the lower levels in an intuitive way

Context-aware person identification in personal photo collections

Identifying the people in photos is an important need for users of photo management systems. We present MediAssist, one such system which facilitates browsing, searching and semi-automatic annotation of personal photos, using analysis of both image content and the context in which the photo is captured. This semi-automatic annotation includes annotation of the identity of people in photos. In this paper, we focus on such person annotation, and propose person identification techniques based on a combination of context and content. We propose language modelling and nearest neighbor approaches to context-based person identification, in addition to novel face color and image color content-based features (used alongside face recognition and body patch features). We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of these techniques using the real private photo collections of a number of users, and show that combining context- and content-based analysis improves performance over content or context alone

The aceToolbox: low-level audiovisual feature extraction for retrieval and classification

In this paper we present an overview of a software platform that has been developed within the aceMedia project, termed the aceToolbox, that provides global and local lowlevel feature extraction from audio-visual content. The toolbox is based on the MPEG-7 eXperimental Model (XM), with extensions to provide descriptor extraction from arbitrarily shaped image segments, thereby supporting local descriptors reflecting real image content. We describe the architecture of the toolbox as well as providing an overview of the descriptors supported to date. We also briefly describe the segmentation algorithm provided. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the toolbox in the context of two different content processing scenarios: similarity-based retrieval in large collections and scene-level classification of still images

Automatic summarization of rushes video using bipartite graphs

In this paper we present a new approach for automatic summarization of rushes video. Our approach is composed of three main steps. First, based on a temporal segmentation, we filter sub-shots with low information content not likely to be useful in a summary. Second, a method using maximal matching in a bipartite graph is adapted to measure similarity between the remaining shots and to minimize inter-shot redundancy by removing repetitive retake shots common in rushes content. Finally, the presence of faces and the motion intensity are characterised in each sub-shot. A measure of how representative the sub-shot is in the context of the overall video is then proposed. Video summaries composed of keyframe slideshows are then generated. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach we re-run the evaluation carried out by the TREC, using the same dataset and evaluation metrics used in the TRECVID video summarization task in 2007 but with our own assessors. Results show that our approach leads to a significant improvement in terms of the fraction of the TRECVID summary ground truth included and is competitive with other approaches in TRECVID 2007

An information-driven framework for image mining

[Abstract]: Image mining systems that can automatically extract semantically meaningful information (knowledge) from image data are increasingly in demand. The fundamental challenge in image mining is to determine how low-level, pixel representation contained in a raw image or image sequence can be processed to identify high-level spatial objects and relationships. To meet this challenge, we propose an efficient information-driven framework for image mining. We distinguish four levels of information: the Pixel Level, the Object Level, the Semantic Concept Level, and the Pattern and Knowledge Level. High-dimensional indexing schemes and retrieval techniques are also included in the framework to support the flow of information among the levels. We believe this framework represents the first step towards capturing the different levels of information present in image data and addressing the issues and challenges of discovering useful patterns/knowledge from each level

TagBook: A Semantic Video Representation without Supervision for Event Detection

We consider the problem of event detection in video for scenarios where only few, or even zero examples are available for training. For this challenging setting, the prevailing solutions in the literature rely on a semantic video representation obtained from thousands of pre-trained concept detectors. Different from existing work, we propose a new semantic video representation that is based on freely available social tagged videos only, without the need for training any intermediate concept detectors. We introduce a simple algorithm that propagates tags from a video's nearest neighbors, similar in spirit to the ones used for image retrieval, but redesign it for video event detection by including video source set refinement and varying the video tag assignment. We call our approach TagBook and study its construction, descriptiveness and detection performance on the TRECVID 2013 and 2014 multimedia event detection datasets and the Columbia Consumer Video dataset. Despite its simple nature, the proposed TagBook video representation is remarkably effective for few-example and zero-example event detection, even outperforming very recent state-of-the-art alternatives building on supervised representations.Comment: accepted for publication as a regular paper in the IEEE Transactions on Multimedi