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

A.: Local structure detection with orientation-invariant radial configuration

Local image descriptors have proved themselves as useful tools for many computer vision tasks such as matching points between multiple images of a scene and object recognition. Current descriptors, such as SIFT, are designed to match image features with unique local neighborhoods. However, the interest point detectors used with SIFT often fail to select perceptible local structures in the image, and the SIFT descriptor does not directly encode the local neighborhood shape. In this paper we propose a symmetry based interest point detector and radial local structure descriptor which consistently captures the majority of basic local image structures and provides a geometrical description of the structure boundaries. This approach concentrates on the extraction of shape properties in image patches, which are an intuitive way to represent local appearance for matching and classification. We explore the specificity and sensitivity of this local descriptor in the context of classification of natural patterns. The implications of the performance comparison with standard approaches like SIFT are discussed. 1