CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Automating the construction of scene classifiers for content-based video retrieval

This paper introduces a real time automatic scene classifier within content-based video retrieval. In our envisioned approach end users like documentalists, not image processing experts, build classifiers interactively, by simply indicating positive examples of a scene. Classification consists of a two stage procedure. First, small image fragments called patches are classified. Second, frequency vectors of these patch classifications are fed into a second classifier for global scene classification (e.g., city, portraits, or countryside). The first stage classifiers can be seen as a set of highly specialized, learned feature detectors, as an alternative to letting an image processing expert determine features a priori. We present results for experiments on a variety of patch and image classes. The scene classifier has been used successfully within television archives and for Internet porn filtering

Assembling and enriching digital library collections

People who create digital libraries need to gather together the raw material, add metadata as necessary, and design and build new collections. This paper sets out the requirements for these tasks and describes a new tool that supports them interactively, making it easy for users to create their own collections from electronic files of all types. The process involves selecting documents for inclusion, coming up with a suitable metadata set, assigning metadata to each document or group of documents, designing the form of the collection in terms of document formats, searchable indexes, and browsing facilities, building the necessary indexes and data structures, and putting the collection in place for others to use. Moreover, different situations require different workflows, and the system must be flexible enough to cope with these demands. Although the tool is specific to the Greenstone digital library software, the underlying ideas should prove useful in more general contexts

Multimedia information technology and the annotation of video

The state of the art in multimedia information technology has not progressed to the point where a single solution is available to meet all reasonable needs of documentalists and users of video archives. In general, we do not have an optimistic view of the usability of new technology in this domain, but digitization and digital power can be expected to cause a small revolution in the area of video archiving. The volume of data leads to two views of the future: on the pessimistic side, overload of data will cause lack of annotation capacity, and on the optimistic side, there will be enough data from which to learn selected concepts that can be deployed to support automatic annotation. At the threshold of this interesting era, we make an attempt to describe the state of the art in technology. We sample the progress in text, sound, and image processing, as well as in machine learning

An MPEG-7 scheme for semantic content modelling and filtering of digital video

Abstract Part 5 of the MPEG-7 standard specifies Multimedia Description Schemes (MDS); that is, the format multimedia content models should conform to in order to ensure interoperability across multiple platforms and applications. However, the standard does not specify how the content or the associated model may be filtered. This paper proposes an MPEG-7 scheme which can be deployed for digital video content modelling and filtering. The proposed scheme, COSMOS-7, produces rich and multi-faceted semantic content models and supports a content-based filtering approach that only analyses content relating directly to the preferred content requirements of the user. We present details of the scheme, front-end systems used for content modelling and filtering and experiences with a number of users

Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017

The TREC-2002 video track report

TREC-2002 saw the second running of the Video Track, the goal of which was to promote progress in content-based retrieval from digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. The track used 73.3 hours of publicly available digital video (in MPEG-1/VCD format) downloaded by the participants directly from the Internet Archive (Prelinger Archives) (internetarchive, 2002) and some from the Open Video Project (Marchionini, 2001). The material comprised advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films produced between the 1930's and the 1970's by corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, educational institutions, and individuals. 17 teams representing 5 companies and 12 universities - 4 from Asia, 9 from Europe, and 4 from the US - participated in one or more of three tasks in the 2001 video track: shot boundary determination, feature extraction, and search (manual or interactive). Results were scored by NIST using manually created truth data for shot boundary determination and manual assessment of feature extraction and search results. This paper is an introduction to, and an overview of, the track framework - the tasks, data, and measures - the approaches taken by the participating groups, the results, and issues regrading the evaluation. For detailed information about the approaches and results, the reader should see the various site reports in the final workshop proceedings

Processing Internal Hard Drives - cover page

As archives receive born digital materials more and more frequently, the challenge of dealing with a variety of hardware and formats is becoming omnipresent. This paper outlines a case study that provides a practical, step-by-step guide to archiving files on legacy hard drives dating from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. The project used a digital forensics approach to provide access to the contents of the hard drives without compromising the integrity of the files. Relying largely on open source software, the project imaged each hard drive in its entirety, then identified folders and individual files of potential high use for upload to the University of Texas Digital Repository. The project also experimented with data visualizations in order to provide researchers who would not have access to the full disk images—a sense of the contents and context of the full drives. The greatest challenge philosophically was answering the question of whether scholars should be able to view deleted materials on the drives that donors may not have realized were accessible

An Analysis of Using Expert Systems and Intelligent Agents for the Virtual Library Project at the Naval Surface Warfare Center-Carderock Division

The Virtual Library Project1 at the Naval Surface Warfare Center/Carderock Division (NSWC/CD) is being developed to facilitate the incorporation and use of library documents via the Internet. These documents typically relate to the design and manufacture of ships for the U.S. Navy Fleet. As such, the libraries will store documents that contain not only text but also images, graphs and design configurations. Because of the dynamic nature of digital documents, particularly those related to design, rapid and effective cataloging of these documents becomes challenging. We conducted a research study to analyze the use of expert systems and intelligent agents to support the function of cataloging digital documents. This chapter provides an overview of past research in the use of expert systems and intelligent agents for cataloging digital documents and discusses our recommendations based on NSWC/CD’s requirements