ImageCLEF 2013: The vision, the data and the open challenges

This paper presents an overview of the ImageCLEF 2013 lab. Since its first edition in 2003, ImageCLEF has become one of the key initiatives promoting the benchmark evaluation of algorithms for the cross-language annotation and retrieval of images in various domains, such as public and personal images, to data acquired by mobile robot platforms and botanic collections. Over the years, by providing new data collections and challenging tasks to the community of interest, the ImageCLEF lab has achieved an unique position in the multi lingual image annotation and retrieval research landscape. The 2013 edition consisted of three tasks: the photo annotation and retrieval task, the plant identification task and the robot vision task. Furthermore, the medical annotation task, that traditionally has been under the ImageCLEF umbrella and that this year celebrates its tenth anniversary, has been organized in conjunction with AMIA for the first time. The paper describes the tasks and the 2013 competition, giving an unifying perspective of the present activities of the lab while discussion the future challenges and opportunities.This work has been partially supported by the Halser Foundation (B. C.),by the LiMoSINe FP7 project under grant # 288024 (B. T.), by the Khresmoi (grant# 257528) and PROMISE ( grant # 258191) FP 7 projects (H.M.) and by the tranScriptorium FP7 project under grant # 600707 (M. V., R. P.)Caputo ., B.; Muller ., H.; Thomee ., B.; Villegas, M.; Paredes Palacios, R.; Zellhofer ., D.; Goeau ., H.... (2013). ImageCLEF 2013: The vision, the data and the open challenges. En Information Access Evaluation. Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Visualization. Springer Verlag (Germany). 8138:250-268. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40802-1_26S2502688138Muller, H., Clough, P., Deselaers, T., Caputo, B.: ImageCLEF: experimental evaluation in visual information retrieval. Springer (2010)Tsikrika, T., Seco de Herrera, A.G., Müller, H.: Assessing the scholarly impact of imageCLEF. In: Forner, P., Gonzalo, J., Kekäläinen, J., Lalmas, M., de Rijke, M. (eds.) CLEF 2011. LNCS, vol. 6941, pp. 95–106. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)Huiskes, M., Lew, M.: The MIR Flickr retrieval evaluation. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval, Vancouver, BC, Canada, pp. 39–43 (2008)Huiskes, M., Thomee, B., Lew, M.: New trends and ideas in visual concept detection. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval, Philadelphia, PA, USA, pp. 527–536 (2010)Villegas, M., Paredes, R.: Overview of the ImageCLEF 2012 Scalable Web Image Annotation Task. In: CLEF 2012 Evaluation Labs and Workshop, Online Working Notes, Rome, Italy (2012)Zellhöfer, D.: Overview of the Personal Photo Retrieval Pilot Task at ImageCLEF 2012. In: CLEF 2012 Evaluation Labs and Workshop, Online Working Notes, Rome, Italy (2012)Villegas, M., Paredes, R., Thomee, B.: Overview of the ImageCLEF 2013 Scalable Concept Image Annotation Subtask. In: CLEF 2013 Evaluation Labs and Workshop, Online Working Notes, Valencia, Spain (2013)Zellhöfer, D.: Overview of the ImageCLEF 2013 Personal Photo Retrieval Subtask. In: CLEF 2013 Evaluation Labs and Workshop, Online Working Notes, Valencia, Spain (2013)Leafsnap (2011)Plantnet (2013)Mobile flora (2013)Folia (2012)Goëau, H., Bonnet, P., Joly, A., Bakic, V., Boujemaa, N., Barthelemy, D., Molino, J.F.: The imageclef 2013 plant identification task. In: ImageCLEF 2013 Working Notes (2013)Pronobis, A., Xing, L., Caputo, B.: Overview of the CLEF 2009 robot vision track. In: Peters, C., Caputo, B., Gonzalo, J., Jones, G.J.F., Kalpathy-Cramer, J., Müller, H., Tsikrika, T. (eds.) CLEF 2009. LNCS, vol. 6242, pp. 110–119. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Pronobis, A., Caputo, B.: The robot vision task. 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The Springer International Series on Information Retrieval, vol. 32. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Kalpathy-Cramer, J., Müller, H., Bedrick, S., Eggel, I., García Seco de Herrera, A., Tsikrika, T.: The CLEF 2011 medical image retrieval and classification tasks. In: Working Notes of CLEF 2011 (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) (2011)Müller, H., García Seco de Herrera, A., Kalpathy-Cramer, J., Demner Fushman, D., Antani, S., Eggel, I.: Overview of the ImageCLEF 2012 medical image retrieval and classification tasks. In: Working Notes of CLEF 2012 (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) (2012)García Seco de Herrera, A., Kalpathy-Cramer, J., Demner Fushman, D., Antani, S., Müller, H.: Overview of the ImageCLEF 2013 medical tasks. In: Working Notes of CLEF 2013 (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) (2013

ImageCLEF 2014: Overview and analysis of the results

This paper presents an overview of the ImageCLEF 2014 evaluation lab. Since its first edition in 2003, ImageCLEF has become one of the key initiatives promoting the benchmark evaluation of algorithms for the annotation and retrieval of images in various domains, such as public and personal images, to data acquired by mobile robot platforms and medical archives. Over the years, by providing new data collections and challenging tasks to the community of interest, the ImageCLEF lab has achieved an unique position in the image annotation and retrieval research landscape. The 2014 edition consists of four tasks: domain adaptation, scalable concept image annotation, liver CT image annotation and robot vision. This paper describes the tasks and the 2014 competition, giving a unifying perspective of the present activities of the lab while discussing future challenges and opportunities.This work has been partially supported by the tranScriptorium FP7 project under grant #600707 (M. V., R. 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Image classification by visual bag-of-words refinement and reduction

This paper presents a new framework for visual bag-of-words (BOW) refinement and reduction to overcome the drawbacks associated with the visual BOW model which has been widely used for image classification. Although very influential in the literature, the traditional visual BOW model has two distinct drawbacks. Firstly, for efficiency purposes, the visual vocabulary is commonly constructed by directly clustering the low-level visual feature vectors extracted from local keypoints, without considering the high-level semantics of images. That is, the visual BOW model still suffers from the semantic gap, and thus may lead to significant performance degradation in more challenging tasks (e.g. social image classification). Secondly, typically thousands of visual words are generated to obtain better performance on a relatively large image dataset. Due to such large vocabulary size, the subsequent image classification may take sheer amount of time. To overcome the first drawback, we develop a graph-based method for visual BOW refinement by exploiting the tags (easy to access although noisy) of social images. More notably, for efficient image classification, we further reduce the refined visual BOW model to a much smaller size through semantic spectral clustering. Extensive experimental results show the promising performance of the proposed framework for visual BOW refinement and reduction

ViDRILO: The Visual and Depth Robot Indoor Localization with Objects information dataset

In this article we describe a semantic localization dataset for indoor environments named ViDRILO. The dataset provides five sequences of frames acquired with a mobile robot in two similar office buildings under different lighting conditions. Each frame consists of a point cloud representation of the scene and a perspective image. The frames in the dataset are annotated with the semantic category of the scene, but also with the presence or absence of a list of predefined objects appearing in the scene. In addition to the frames and annotations, the dataset is distributed with a set of tools for its use in both place classification and object recognition tasks. The large number of labeled frames in conjunction with the annotation scheme make this dataset different from existing ones. The ViDRILO dataset is released for use as a benchmark for different problems such as multimodal place classification and object recognition, 3D reconstruction or point cloud data compression.This work was supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Spanish Government, and by Consejería de Educación, Cultura y Deportes of the JCCM regional government through project PPII-2014-015-P (grant number DPI2013-40534-R). Jesus Martínez-Gómez is also funded by the JCCM (grant number POST2014/8171)

Academic competitions

Academic challenges comprise effective means for (i) advancing the state of the art, (ii) putting in the spotlight of a scientific community specific topics and problems, as well as (iii) closing the gap for under represented communities in terms of accessing and participating in the shaping of research fields. Competitions can be traced back for centuries and their achievements have had great influence in our modern world. Recently, they (re)gained popularity, with the overwhelming amounts of data that is being generated in different domains, as well as the need of pushing the barriers of existing methods, and available tools to handle such data. This chapter provides a survey of academic challenges in the context of machine learning and related fields. We review the most influential competitions in the last few years and analyze challenges per area of knowledge. The aims of scientific challenges, their goals, major achievements and expectations for the next few years are reviewed

New Classification and Generative Model for Medical Visual Question Answering

Medical images are playing an important role in the medical domain. A mature medical visual question answering system can aid diagnosis, but there is no satisfactory method to solve this comprehensive problem so far. Considering that there are many different types of questions, we propose a model called CGMVQA, including classification and answer generation capabilities to turn this complex problem into multiple simple problems in this paper. We adopt data augmentation on images and tokenization on texts. We use pre-trained ResNet152 to extract image features and add three kinds of embeddings together to deal with texts. We reduce the parameters of the multi-head self-attention transformer to cut the computational cost down. We adjust the masking and output layers to change the functions of the model. This model establishes new state-of-the-art results: 0.640 of classification accuracy, 0.659 of word matching and 0.678 of semantic similarity in ImageCLEF 2019 VQA-Med data set. It suggests that the CGMVQA is effective in medical visual question answering and can better assist doctors in clinical analysis and diagnosis

Use Case Oriented Medical Visual Information Retrieval & System Evaluation

Large amounts of medical visual data are produced daily in hospitals, while new imaging techniques continue to emerge. In addition, many images are made available continuously via publications in the scientific literature and can also be valuable for clinical routine, research and education. Information retrieval systems are useful tools to provide access to the biomedical literature and fulfil the information needs of medical professionals. The tools developed in this thesis can potentially help clinicians make decisions about difficult diagnoses via a case-based retrieval system based on a use case associated with a specific evaluation task. This system retrieves articles from the biomedical literature when querying with a case description and attached images. This thesis proposes a multimodal approach for medical case-based retrieval with focus on the integration of visual information connected to text. Furthermore, the ImageCLEFmed evaluation campaign was organised during this thesis promoting medical retrieval system evaluation