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

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

Designing a Semantically Rich Visual Iinterface for Cultural Digital Libraries Using the UNESCO Multilingual Thesaurus

This paper reports on the design of a visual user interface for the UNESCO digital portal. The interface makes use of the UNESCO multilingual thesaurus to provide visualized views of terms and their relationships and the way in which spaces associated with the thesaurus, the query and the results can be integrated into a single user interface.\u

Large scale evaluations of multimedia information retrieval: the TRECVid experience

Information Retrieval is a supporting technique which underpins a broad range of content-based applications including retrieval, filtering, summarisation, browsing, classification, clustering, automatic linking, and others. Multimedia information retrieval (MMIR) represents those applications when applied to multimedia information such as image, video, music, etc. In this presentation and extended abstract we are primarily concerned with MMIR as applied to information in digital video format. We begin with a brief overview of large scale evaluations of IR tasks in areas such as text, image and music, just to illustrate that this phenomenon is not just restricted to MMIR on video. The main contribution, however, is a set of pointers and a summarisation of the work done as part of TRECVid, the annual benchmarking exercise for video retrieval tasks

Context-aware person identification in personal photo collections

Identifying the people in photos is an important need for users of photo management systems. We present MediAssist, one such system which facilitates browsing, searching and semi-automatic annotation of personal photos, using analysis of both image content and the context in which the photo is captured. This semi-automatic annotation includes annotation of the identity of people in photos. In this paper, we focus on such person annotation, and propose person identification techniques based on a combination of context and content. We propose language modelling and nearest neighbor approaches to context-based person identification, in addition to novel face color and image color content-based features (used alongside face recognition and body patch features). We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of these techniques using the real private photo collections of a number of users, and show that combining context- and content-based analysis improves performance over content or context alone

Designing a semantically rich visual interface for cultural digital libraries using the UNEsCO multilingual thesaurus

This paper reports on the design of a visual user interface for the UNESCO digital portal. The interface makes use of the UNESCO multilingual thesaurus to provide visualized views of terms and their relationships and the way in which spaces associated with the thesaurus, the query and the results can be integrated into a single user interface

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