Advanced content-based semantic scene analysis and information retrieval: the SCHEMA project

The aim of the SCHEMA Network of Excellence is to bring together a critical mass of universities, research centers, industrial partners and end users, in order to design a reference system for content-based semantic scene analysis, interpretation and understanding. Relevant research areas include: content-based multimedia analysis and automatic annotation of semantic multimedia content, combined textual and multimedia information retrieval, semantic -web, MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 standards, user interfaces and human factors. In this paper, recent advances in content-based analysis, indexing and retrieval of digital media within the SCHEMA Network are presented. These advances will be integrated in the SCHEMA module-based, expandable reference system

Multimedia Annotations on the Semantic Web

Multimedia in all forms (images, video, graphics, music, speech) is exploding on the Web. The content needs to be annotated and indexed to enable effective search and retrieval. However, recent standards and best practices for multimedia metadata don't provide semantically rich descriptions of multimedia content. On the other hand, the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Semantic Web effort has been making great progress in advancing techniques for annotating semantics of Web resources. To bridge this gap, a new W3C task force has been created to investigate multimedia annotations on the Semantic Web. This article examines the problems of semantically annotating multimedia and describes the integration of multimedia metadata with the Semantic Web. (Editor's note by John R. Smith)

Towards robust and reliable multimedia analysis through semantic integration of services

Thanks to ubiquitous Web connectivity and portable multimedia devices, it has never been so easy to produce and distribute new multimedia resources such as videos, photos, and audio. This ever-increasing production leads to an information overload for consumers, which calls for efficient multimedia retrieval techniques. Multimedia resources can be efficiently retrieved using their metadata, but the multimedia analysis methods that can automatically generate this metadata are currently not reliable enough for highly diverse multimedia content. A reliable and automatic method for analyzing general multimedia content is needed. We introduce a domain-agnostic framework that annotates multimedia resources using currently available multimedia analysis methods. By using a three-step reasoning cycle, this framework can assess and improve the quality of multimedia analysis results, by consecutively (1) combining analysis results effectively, (2) predicting which results might need improvement, and (3) invoking compatible analysis methods to retrieve new results. By using semantic descriptions for the Web services that wrap the multimedia analysis methods, compatible services can be automatically selected. By using additional semantic reasoning on these semantic descriptions, the different services can be repurposed across different use cases. We evaluated this problem-agnostic framework in the context of video face detection, and showed that it is capable of providing the best analysis results regardless of the input video. The proposed methodology can serve as a basis to build a generic multimedia annotation platform, which returns reliable results for diverse multimedia analysis problems. This allows for better metadata generation, and improves the efficient retrieval of multimedia resources

Are we Ready to Embrace the Semantic Web?

The aim of the semantic web is to describe resources available on the web using metadata elements that can be processed or interpreted by machines. MPEG-7 is the result of a standardisation effort to annotate multimedia documents, and it offers a rich suite of metadata descriptors for describing these documents at various levels of abstraction from low-level features to high-level semantics. Owing to the proliferation of multimedia content in the internet, there is now a lot of interest in the semantic web community in multimedia metadata standards in general, and MPEG-7 in particular. Despite the fact that the semantic web initiatives could benefit a lot from MPEG-7 for the annotation of multimedia documents, recent studies have underlined the limitations of MPEG-7 in describing the semantics of highly structured domains like sports or medicine. This has led to an upsurge of interest in adopting an integrated approach to the design of multimedia ontologies. In our work, we describe a systematic approach to the design of multimedia ontologies in which we use MPEG-7 to model only the structural and the low-level aspects of multimedia documents. High-level semantics are described using domain-specific vocabularies. A retrieval engine based on this framework will then be able to process high-level text-based semantic queries. Whilst a lot of research has been done in the design of multimedia ontologies, a plaguing issue is the automatic annotation of multimedia content at a semantic level. It is possible to derive low-level descriptors using state-of-the-art techniques in multimedia content analysis, but the same does not hold true when it comes to analysing multimedia content at a high level of abstraction. We discuss various approaches that have been recently proposed to accomplish this task. An interesting line of discussion is the automatic population and enrichment of multimedia ontologies that offers a lot of challenges and stresses the need for efficient approaches for the semantic analysis of multimedia documents

Text-based Semantic Annotation Service for Multimedia Content in the Esperonto project

Within the Esperonto project, an integration of NLP, ontologies and other knowledge bases, is being performed with the goal to implement a semantic annotation service that upgrades the actual Web towards the emerging Semantic Web. Research is being currently conducted on how to apply the Esperonto semantic annotation service to text material associated with still images in web pages. In doing so, the project will allow for semantic querying of still images in the web, but also (automatically) create a large set of text-based semantic annotations of still images, which can be used by the Multimedia community in order to support the task of content indexing of image material, possibly combining the Esperonto type of annotations with the annotations resulting from image analysis

Creating a web-scale video collection for research

This paper begins by considering a number of important design questions for a web-scale, widely available, multimedia test collection intended to support long-term scientific evaluation and comparison of content-based video analysis and exploitation systems. Such exploitation systems would include the kinds of functionality already explored within the annual TRECVid benchmarking activity such as search, semantic concept detection, and automatic summarisation. We then report on our progress in creating such a multimedia collection which we believe to be web scale and which will support a next generation of benchmarking activities for content-based video operations, and we report on our plans for how we intend to put this collection, the IACC.1 collection, to use

That obscure object of desire: multimedia metadata on the Web, part 2

This article discusses the state of the art in metadata for audio-visual media in large semantic networks, such as the Semantic Web. Our discussion is predominantly motivated by the two most widely known approaches towards machine-processable and semantic-based content description, namely the Semantic Web activity of the W3C and ISO's efforts in the direction of complex media content modeling, in particular the Multimedia Content Description Interface (MPEG-7). We explain that the conceptual ideas and technologies discussed in both approaches are essential for the next step in multimedia development. Unfortunately, there are still many practical obstacles that block their widespread use for providing multimedia metadata on the Web. Based on a scenario to explain our vision of a media-aware Semantic Web, we derive in Part I a number of problems regarding the semantic content description of media units. We then discuss the multimedia production chain, in particular emphasizing the role of progressive metadata production. As a result we distill a set of media-based metadata production requirements and show how current media production environments fail to address these. We then introduce those parts of the W3C and ISO standardization works that are relevant to our discussion. In Part II of this article, we analyze their abilities to define structures for describing media semantics, discuss syntactic and semantic problems, ontological problems for media semantics, and the problems of applying the theoretical concepts to real world problems. Part II concludes with implications of the findings for future action with respect to the actions the community should take

Cuypers : a semi-automatic hypermedia generation system

The report describes the architecture of emph{Cuypers, a system supporting second and third generation Web-based multimedia. First generation Web-content encodes information in handwritten (HTML) Web pages. Second generation Web content generates HTML pages on demand, e.g. by filling in templates with content retrieved dynamically from a database or transformation of structured documents using style sheets (e.g. XSLT). Third generation Web pages will make use of rich markup (e.g. XML) along with metadata (e.g. RDF) schemes to make the content not only machine readable but also machine processable --- a necessary pre-requisite to the emph{Semantic Web. While text-based content on the Web is already rapidly approaching the third generation, multimedia content is still trying to catch up with second generation techniques. Multimedia document processing has a number of fundamentally different requirements from text which make it more difficult to incorporate within the document processing chain. In particular, multimedia transformation uses different document and presentation abstractions, its formatting rules cannot be based on text-flow, it requires feedback from the formatting back-end and is hard to describe in the functional style of current style languages. We state the requirements for second generation processing of multimedia and describe how these have been incorporated in our prototype multimedia document transformation environment, emph{Cuypers. The system overcomes a number of the restrictions of the text-flow based tool sets by integrating a number of conceptually distinct processing steps in a single runtime execution environment. We describe the need for these different processing steps and describe them in turn (semantic structure, communicative device, qualitative constraints, quantitative constraints, final form presentation), and illustrate our approach by means of an example. We conclude by discussing the models and techniques required for the creation of third generation multimedia content

That obscure object of desire: multimedia metadata on the Web, part 1

This article discusses the state of the art in metadata for audio-visual media in large semantic networks, such as the Semantic Web. Our discussion is predominantly motivated by the two most widely known approaches towards machine-processable and semantic-based content description, namely the Semantic Web activity of the W3C and ISO's efforts in the direction of complex media content modeling, in particular the Multimedia Content Description Interface (MPEG-7). We explain that the conceptual ideas and technologies discussed in both approaches are essential for the next step in multim