Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Handling temporal heterogeneous data for content-based management of large video collections

Video document retrieval is now an active part of the domain of multimedia retrieval. However, unlike for other media, the management of a collection of video documents adds the problem of efficiently handling an overwhelming volume of temporal data. Challenges include balancing efficient content modeling and storage against fast access at various levels. In this paper, we detail the framework we have built to accommodate our developments in content-based multimedia retrieval. We show that not only our framework facilitates the development of processing and indexing algorithms but it also opens the way to several other possibilities such as rapid interface prototyping or retrieval algorithm benchmarking. Here, we discuss our developments in relation to wider contexts such as MPEG-7 and the TREC Video Trac

Meetings and Meeting Modeling in Smart Environments

In this paper we survey our research on smart meeting rooms and its relevance for augmented reality meeting support and virtual reality generation of meetings in real time or off-line. The research reported here forms part of the European 5th and 6th framework programme projects multi-modal meeting manager (M4) and augmented multi-party interaction (AMI). Both projects aim at building a smart meeting environment that is able to collect multimodal captures of the activities and discussions in a meeting room, with the aim to use this information as input to tools that allow real-time support, browsing, retrieval and summarization of meetings. Our aim is to research (semantic) representations of what takes place during meetings in order to allow generation, e.g. in virtual reality, of meeting activities (discussions, presentations, voting, etc.). Being able to do so also allows us to look at tools that provide support during a meeting and at tools that allow those not able to be physically present during a meeting to take part in a virtual way. This may lead to situations where the differences between real meeting participants, human-controlled virtual participants and (semi-) autonomous virtual participants disappear

Video browsing interfaces and applications: a review

We present a comprehensive review of the state of the art in video browsing and retrieval systems, with special emphasis on interfaces and applications. There has been a significant increase in activity (e.g., storage, retrieval, and sharing) employing video data in the past decade, both for personal and professional use. The ever-growing amount of video content available for human consumption and the inherent characteristics of video data—which, if presented in its raw format, is rather unwieldy and costly—have become driving forces for the development of more effective solutions to present video contents and allow rich user interaction. As a result, there are many contemporary research efforts toward developing better video browsing solutions, which we summarize. We review more than 40 different video browsing and retrieval interfaces and classify them into three groups: applications that use video-player-like interaction, video retrieval applications, and browsing solutions based on video surrogates. For each category, we present a summary of existing work, highlight the technical aspects of each solution, and compare them against each other

A Multimodal Database Framework for Multimedia Meeting Annotations

The main objective of this paper is to present a flexible annotation management framework for a multimedia database system, applied to meeting recordings. Presented research and development activities are carried out within the scope of the IM2 project in which annotations play an important role in describing raw data from various points of view and in enhancing the query process. We focus on a database system capable of managing annotations (e.g. text transcriptions, dialog acts, speaker space position, etc.) and keeping links with raw data (audio, video, digital documents). This database provides a schema evolution mechanism and a meta-description layer ensuring flexible and incremental annotation definitions. To enhance this database system, some research works are currently in progress: a predictive methodology for schema evolution and a query technique that deals with fuzzy concepts and ontological commitments. We describe our on-going prototype development, in which we focus on data storage and interactive data access

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

Temporal multimodal video and lifelog retrieval

The past decades have seen exponential growth of both consumption and production of data, with multimedia such as images and videos contributing significantly to said growth. The widespread proliferation of smartphones has provided everyday users with the ability to consume and produce such content easily. As the complexity and diversity of multimedia data has grown, so has the need for more complex retrieval models which address the information needs of users. Finding relevant multimedia content is central in many scenarios, from internet search engines and medical retrieval to querying one's personal multimedia archive, also called lifelog. Traditional retrieval models have often focused on queries targeting small units of retrieval, yet users usually remember temporal context and expect results to include this. However, there is little research into enabling these information needs in interactive multimedia retrieval. In this thesis, we aim to close this research gap by making several contributions to multimedia retrieval with a focus on two scenarios, namely video and lifelog retrieval. We provide a retrieval model for complex information needs with temporal components, including a data model for multimedia retrieval, a query model for complex information needs, and a modular and adaptable query execution model which includes novel algorithms for result fusion. The concepts and models are implemented in vitrivr, an open-source multimodal multimedia retrieval system, which covers all aspects from extraction to query formulation and browsing. vitrivr has proven its usefulness in evaluation campaigns and is now used in two large-scale interdisciplinary research projects. We show the feasibility and effectiveness of our contributions in two ways: firstly, through results from user-centric evaluations which pit different user-system combinations against one another. Secondly, we perform a system-centric evaluation by creating a new dataset for temporal information needs in video and lifelog retrieval with which we quantitatively evaluate our models. The results show significant benefits for systems that enable users to specify more complex information needs with temporal components. Participation in interactive retrieval evaluation campaigns over multiple years provides insight into possible future developments and challenges of such campaigns

Visual Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries

The emergence of information highways and multimedia computing has resulted in redefining the concept of libraries. It is widely believed that in the next few years, a significant portion of information in libraries will be in the form of multimedia electronic documents. Many approaches are being proposed for storing, retrieving, assimilating, harvesting, and prospecting information from these multimedia documents. Digital libraries are expected to allow users to access information independent of the locations and types of data sources and will provide a unified picture of information. In this paper, we discuss requirements of these emerging information systems and present query methods and data models for these systems. Finally, we briefly present a few examples of approaches that provide a preview of how things will be done in the digital libraries in the near future.published or submitted for publicatio