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

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

Accessibility-based reranking in multimedia search engines

Traditional multimedia search engines retrieve results based mostly on the query submitted by the user, or using a log of previous searches to provide personalized results, while not considering the accessibility of the results for users with vision or other types of impairments. In this paper, a novel approach is presented which incorporates the accessibility of images for users with various vision impairments, such as color blindness, cataract and glaucoma, in order to rerank the results of an image search engine. The accessibility of individual images is measured through the use of vision simulation filters. Multi-objective optimization techniques utilizing the image accessibility scores are used to handle users with multiple vision impairments, while the impairment profile of a specific user is used to select one from the Pareto-optimal solutions. The proposed approach has been tested with two image datasets, using both simulated and real impaired users, and the results verify its applicability. Although the proposed method has been used for vision accessibility-based reranking, it can also be extended for other types of personalization context

AMC: Attention guided Multi-modal Correlation Learning for Image Search

Given a user's query, traditional image search systems rank images according to its relevance to a single modality (e.g., image content or surrounding text). Nowadays, an increasing number of images on the Internet are available with associated meta data in rich modalities (e.g., titles, keywords, tags, etc.), which can be exploited for better similarity measure with queries. In this paper, we leverage visual and textual modalities for image search by learning their correlation with input query. According to the intent of query, attention mechanism can be introduced to adaptively balance the importance of different modalities. We propose a novel Attention guided Multi-modal Correlation (AMC) learning method which consists of a jointly learned hierarchy of intra and inter-attention networks. Conditioned on query's intent, intra-attention networks (i.e., visual intra-attention network and language intra-attention network) attend on informative parts within each modality; a multi-modal inter-attention network promotes the importance of the most query-relevant modalities. In experiments, we evaluate AMC models on the search logs from two real world image search engines and show a significant boost on the ranking of user-clicked images in search results. Additionally, we extend AMC models to caption ranking task on COCO dataset and achieve competitive results compared with recent state-of-the-arts.Comment: CVPR 201

Multimodal Content Delivery for Geo-services

This thesis describes a body of work carried out over several research projects in the area of multimodal interaction for location-based services. Research in this area has progressed from using simulated mobile environments to demonstrate the visual modality, to the ubiquitous delivery of rich media using multimodal interfaces (geo- services). To effectively deliver these services, research focused on innovative solutions to real-world problems in a number of disciplines including geo-location, mobile spatial interaction, location-based services, rich media interfaces and auditory user interfaces. My original contributions to knowledge are made in the areas of multimodal interaction underpinned by advances in geo-location technology and supported by the proliferation of mobile device technology into modern life. Accurate positioning is a known problem for location-based services, contributions in the area of mobile positioning demonstrate a hybrid positioning technology for mobile devices that uses terrestrial beacons to trilaterate position. Information overload is an active concern for location-based applications that struggle to manage large amounts of data, contributions in the area of egocentric visibility that filter data based on field-of-view demonstrate novel forms of multimodal input. One of the more pertinent characteristics of these applications is the delivery or output modality employed (auditory, visual or tactile). Further contributions in the area of multimodal content delivery are made, where multiple modalities are used to deliver information using graphical user interfaces, tactile interfaces and more notably auditory user interfaces. It is demonstrated how a combination of these interfaces can be used to synergistically deliver context sensitive rich media to users - in a responsive way - based on usage scenarios that consider the affordance of the device, the geographical position and bearing of the device and also the location of the device

Augmenting human memory using personal lifelogs

Memory is a key human facility to support life activities, including social interactions, life management and problem solving. Unfortunately, our memory is not perfect. Normal individuals will have occasional memory problems which can be frustrating, while those with memory impairments can often experience a greatly reduced quality of life. Augmenting memory has the potential to make normal individuals more effective, and those with significant memory problems to have a higher general quality of life. Current technologies are now making it possible to automatically capture and store daily life experiences over an extended period, potentially even over a lifetime. This type of data collection, often referred to as a personal life log (PLL), can include data such as continuously captured pictures or videos from a first person perspective, scanned copies of archival material such as books, electronic documents read or created, and emails and SMS messages sent and received, along with context data of time of capture and access and location via GPS sensors. PLLs offer the potential for memory augmentation. Existing work on PLLs has focused on the technologies of data capture and retrieval, but little work has been done to explore how these captured data and retrieval techniques can be applied to actual use by normal people in supporting their memory. In this paper, we explore the needs for augmenting human memory from normal people based on the psychology literature on mechanisms about memory problems, and discuss the possible functions that PLLs can provide to support these memory augmentation needs. Based on this, we also suggest guidelines for data for capture, retrieval needs and computer-based interface design. Finally we introduce our work-in-process prototype PLL search system in the iCLIPS project to give an example of augmenting human memory with PLLs and computer based interfaces

Services surround you:physical-virtual linkage with contextual bookmarks

Our daily life is pervaded by digital information and devices, not least the common mobile phone. However, a seamless connection between our physical world, such as a movie trailer on a screen in the main rail station and its digital counterparts, such as an online ticket service, remains difficult. In this paper, we present contextual bookmarks that enable users to capture information of interest with a mobile camera phone. Depending on the user’s context, the snapshot is mapped to a digital service such as ordering tickets for a movie theater close by or a link to the upcoming movie’s Web page