Dublin City University video track experiments for TREC 2003

In this paper, we describe our experiments for both the News Story Segmentation task and Interactive Search task for TRECVID 2003. Our News Story Segmentation task involved the use of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to combine evidence from audio-visual analysis tools in order to generate a listing of news stories from a given news programme. Our Search task experiment compared a video retrieval system based on text, image and relevance feedback with a text-only video retrieval system in order to identify which was more effective. In order to do so we developed two variations of our Físchlár video retrieval system and conducted user testing in a controlled lab environment. In this paper we outline our work on both of these two tasks

Towards an All-Purpose Content-Based Multimedia Information Retrieval System

The growth of multimedia collections - in terms of size, heterogeneity, and variety of media types - necessitates systems that are able to conjointly deal with several forms of media, especially when it comes to searching for particular objects. However, existing retrieval systems are organized in silos and treat different media types separately. As a consequence, retrieval across media types is either not supported at all or subject to major limitations. In this paper, we present vitrivr, a content-based multimedia information retrieval stack. As opposed to the keyword search approach implemented by most media management systems, vitrivr makes direct use of the object's content to facilitate different types of similarity search, such as Query-by-Example or Query-by-Sketch, for and, most importantly, across different media types - namely, images, audio, videos, and 3D models. Furthermore, we introduce a new web-based user interface that enables easy-to-use, multimodal retrieval from and browsing in mixed media collections. The effectiveness of vitrivr is shown on the basis of a user study that involves different query and media types. To the best of our knowledge, the full vitrivr stack is unique in that it is the first multimedia retrieval system that seamlessly integrates support for four different types of media. As such, it paves the way towards an all-purpose, content-based multimedia information retrieval system

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

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

Unsupervised Visual and Textual Information Fusion in Multimedia Retrieval - A Graph-based Point of View

Multimedia collections are more than ever growing in size and diversity. Effective multimedia retrieval systems are thus critical to access these datasets from the end-user perspective and in a scalable way. We are interested in repositories of image/text multimedia objects and we study multimodal information fusion techniques in the context of content based multimedia information retrieval. We focus on graph based methods which have proven to provide state-of-the-art performances. We particularly examine two of such methods : cross-media similarities and random walk based scores. From a theoretical viewpoint, we propose a unifying graph based framework which encompasses the two aforementioned approaches. Our proposal allows us to highlight the core features one should consider when using a graph based technique for the combination of visual and textual information. We compare cross-media and random walk based results using three different real-world datasets. From a practical standpoint, our extended empirical analysis allow us to provide insights and guidelines about the use of graph based methods for multimodal information fusion in content based multimedia information retrieval.Comment: An extended version of the paper: Visual and Textual Information Fusion in Multimedia Retrieval using Semantic Filtering and Graph based Methods, by J. Ah-Pine, G. Csurka and S. Clinchant, submitted to ACM Transactions on Information System

PFTijah: text search in an XML database system

This paper introduces the PFTijah system, a text search system that is integrated with an XML/XQuery database management system. We present examples of its use, we explain some of the system internals, and discuss plans for future work. PFTijah is part of the open source release of MonetDB/XQuery