Cultural Event Recognition with Visual ConvNets and Temporal Models

This paper presents our contribution to the ChaLearn Challenge 2015 on Cultural Event Classification. The challenge in this task is to automatically classify images from 50 different cultural events. Our solution is based on the combination of visual features extracted from convolutional neural networks with temporal information using a hierarchical classifier scheme. We extract visual features from the last three fully connected layers of both CaffeNet (pretrained with ImageNet) and our fine tuned version for the ChaLearn challenge. We propose a late fusion strategy that trains a separate low-level SVM on each of the extracted neural codes. The class predictions of the low-level SVMs form the input to a higher level SVM, which gives the final event scores. We achieve our best result by adding a temporal refinement step into our classification scheme, which is applied directly to the output of each low-level SVM. Our approach penalizes high classification scores based on visual features when their time stamp does not match well an event-specific temporal distribution learned from the training and validation data. Our system achieved the second best result in the ChaLearn Challenge 2015 on Cultural Event Classification with a mean average precision of 0.767 on the test set.Comment: Initial version of the paper accepted at the CVPR Workshop ChaLearn Looking at People 201

Automatic Synchronization of Multi-User Photo Galleries

In this paper we address the issue of photo galleries synchronization, where pictures related to the same event are collected by different users. Existing solutions to address the problem are usually based on unrealistic assumptions, like time consistency across photo galleries, and often heavily rely on heuristics, limiting therefore the applicability to real-world scenarios. We propose a solution that achieves better generalization performance for the synchronization task compared to the available literature. The method is characterized by three stages: at first, deep convolutional neural network features are used to assess the visual similarity among the photos; then, pairs of similar photos are detected across different galleries and used to construct a graph; eventually, a probabilistic graphical model is used to estimate the temporal offset of each pair of galleries, by traversing the minimum spanning tree extracted from this graph. The experimental evaluation is conducted on four publicly available datasets covering different types of events, demonstrating the strength of our proposed method. A thorough discussion of the obtained results is provided for a critical assessment of the quality in synchronization.Comment: ACCEPTED to IEEE Transactions on Multimedi

Social Event Detection at MediaEval: a three-year retrospect of tasks and results

Petkos G, Papadopoulos S, Mezaris V, et al. Social Event Detection at MediaEval: a three-year retrospect of tasks and results. In: Proc. ACM ICMR 2014 Workshop on Social Events in Web Multimedia (SEWM). 2014.This paper presents an overview of the Social Event Detection (SED) task that has been running as part of the MediaEval benchmarking activity for three consecutive years (2011 - 2013). The task has focused on various aspects of social event detection and retrieval and has attracted a significant number of participants. We discuss the evolution of the task and the datasets, we summarize the set of approaches ursued by participants and evaluate the overall collective progress that has been achieved

Cross-Lingual Cross-Platform Rumor Verification Pivoting on Multimedia Content

With the increasing popularity of smart devices, rumors with multimedia content become more and more common on social networks. The multimedia information usually makes rumors look more convincing. Therefore, finding an automatic approach to verify rumors with multimedia content is a pressing task. Previous rumor verification research only utilizes multimedia as input features. We propose not to use the multimedia content but to find external information in other news platforms pivoting on it. We introduce a new features set, cross-lingual cross-platform features that leverage the semantic similarity between the rumors and the external information. When implemented, machine learning methods utilizing such features achieved the state-of-the-art rumor verification results

Deliverable D9.3 Final Project Report

This document comprises the final report of LinkedTV. It includes a publishable summary, a plan for use and dissemination of foreground and a report covering the wider societal implications of the project in the form of a questionnaire

ReSEED: Social Event dEtection Dataset

Reuter T, Papadopoulos S, Mezaris V, Cimiano P. ReSEED: Social Event dEtection Dataset. In: MMSys '14. Proceedings of the 5th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference . New York: ACM; 2014: 35-40.Nowadays, digital cameras are very popular among people and quite every mobile phone has a build-in camera. Social events have a prominent role in people’s life. Thus, people take pictures of events they take part in and more and more of them upload these to well-known online photo community sites like Flickr. The number of pictures uploaded to these sites is still proliferating and there is a great interest in automatizing the process of event clustering so that every incoming (picture) document can be assigned to the corresponding event without the need of human interaction. These social events are defined as events that are planned by people, attended by people and for which the social multimedia are also captured by people. There is an urgent need to develop algorithms which are capable of grouping media by the social events they depict or are related to. In order to train, test, and evaluate such algorithms and frameworks, we present a dataset that consists of about 430,000 photos from Flickr together with the underlying ground truth consisting of about 21,000 social events. All the photos are accompanied by their textual metadata. The ground truth for the event groupings has been derived from event calendars on the Web that have been created collaboratively by people. The dataset has been used in the Social Event Detection (SED) task that was part of the MediaEval Benchmark for Multimedia Evaluation 2013. This task required participants to discover social events and organize the related media items in event-specific clusters within a collection of Web multimedia documents. In this paper we describe how the dataset has been collected and the creation of the ground truth together with a proposed evaluation methodology and a brief description of the corresponding task challenge as applied in the context of the Social Event Detection task

Detection of Social Events in Streams of Social Multimedia

Combining items from social media streams, such as Flickr photos and Twitter tweets, into meaningful groups can help users contextualise and consume more effectively the torrents of information continuously being made available on the social web. This task is made challenging due to the scale of the streams and the inherently multimodal nature of the information being contextualised.The problem of grouping social media items into meaningful groups can be seen as an ill-posed and application specific unsupervised clustering problem. A fundamental question in multimodal contexts is determining which features best signify that two items should belong to the same grouping.This paper presents a methodology which approaches social event detection as a streaming multi-modal clustering task. The methodology takes advantage of the temporal nature of social events and as a side benefit, allows for scaling to real-world datasets. Specific challenges of the social event detection task are addressed: the engineering and selection of the features used to compare items to one another; a feature fusion strategy that incorporates relative importance of features; the construction of a single sparse affinity matrix; and clustering techniques which produce meaningful item groups whilst scaling to cluster very large numbers of items.The state-of-the-art approach presented here is evaluated using the ReSEED dataset with standardised evaluation measures. With automatically learned feature weights, we achieve an F1 score of 0.94, showing that a good compromise between precision and recall of clusters can be achieved. In a comparison with other state-of-the-art algorithms our approach is shown to give the best results

Deliverable D7.7 Dissemination and Standardisation Report v3

This deliverable presents the LinkedTV dissemination and standardisation report for the project period of months 31 to 42 (April 2014 to March 2015)

Deliverable D7.5 LinkedTV Dissemination and Standardisation Report v2

This deliverable presents the LinkedTV dissemination and standardisation report for the project period of months 19 to 30 (April 2013 to March 2014)