Exquisitor at the Lifelog Search Challenge 2020

We present an enhanced version of Exquisitor, our interactive and scalable media exploration system. At its core, Exquisitor is an interactive learning system using relevance feedback on media items to build a model of the users' information need. Relying on efficient media representation and indexing, it facilitates real-time user interaction. The new features for the Lifelog Search Challenge 2020 include support for timeline browsing, search functionality for finding positive examples, and significant interface improvements. Participation in the Lifelog Search Challenge allows us to compare our paradigm, relying predominantly on interactive learning, with more traditional search-based multimedia retrieval systems

VRLE: Lifelog Interaction Prototype in Virtual Reality:Lifelog Search Challenge at ACM ICMR 2020

The Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC) invites researchers to share their prototypes for interactive lifelog retrieval and encourages competition to develop and evaluate effective methodologies to achieve this. With this paper we present a novel approach to visual lifelog exploration based on our research to date utilising virtual reality as a medium for interactive information retrieval. The VRLE prototype presented is an iteration on a previous system which won the first LSC competition at ACM ICMR 2018

FIRST - Flexible interactive retrieval SysTem for visual lifelog exploration at LSC 2020

Lifelog can provide useful insights of our daily activities. It is essential to provide a flexible way for users to retrieve certain events or moments of interest, corresponding to a wide variation of query types. This motivates us to develop FIRST, a Flexible Interactive Retrieval SysTem, to help users to combine or integrate various query components in a flexible manner to handle different query scenarios, such as visual clustering data based on color histogram, visual similarity, GPS location, or scene attributes. We also employ personalized concept detection and image captioning to enhance image understanding from visual lifelog data, and develop an autoencoderlike approach for query text and image feature mapping. Furthermore, we refine the user interface of the retrieval system to better assist users in query expansion and verifying sequential events in a flexible temporal resolution to control the navigation speed through sequences of images

Memento: a prototype lifelog search engine for LSC’21

In this paper, we introduce a new lifelog retrieval system called Memento that leverages semantic representations of images and textual queries projected into a common latent space to facilitate effective retrieval. It bridges the semantic gap between complex visual scenes/events and user information needs expressed as textual and faceted queries. The system, developed for the 2021 Lifelog Search Challenge also has a minimalist user interface that includes primary search, temporal search, and visual data filtering components

Myscéal: an experimental interactive lifelog retrieval system for LSC'20

The Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC), is an annual comparative benchmarking activity for comparing approaches to interactive retrieval from multi-modal lifelogs. Being an interactive search challenge, issues such as retrieval accuracy, search speed and usability of interfaces are key challenges that must be addressed by every participant. In this paper, we introduce Myscéal, an interactive lifelog retrieval engine designed to support novice users to retrieve items of interest from a large multimodal lifelog. Additionally, we also introduce a new similarity measure called “aTFIDF”, to match a user’s free-text information need with the multimodal lifelog index

LifeSeeker 2.0: interactive lifelog search engine at LSC 2020

In this paper we present our interactive lifelog retrieval engine in the LSC’20 comparative benchmarking challenge. The LifeSeeker 2.0 interactive lifelog retrieval engine is developed by both Dublin City University and Ho Chi Minh University of Science, which represents an enhanced version of the two corresponding interactive lifelog retrieval engines in LSC’19. The implementation of LifeSeeker 2.0 has been designed to focus on the searching by text query using a Bag-of-Words model with visual concept augmentation and additional improvements in query processing time, enhanced result display and browsing support, and interacting with visual graphs for both query and filter purposes

Flexible interactive retrieval SysTem 3.0 for visual lifelog exploration at LSC 2022

Building a retrieval system with lifelogging data is more complicated than with ordinary data due to the redundancies, blurriness, massive amount of data, various sources of information accompanying lifelogging data, and especially the ad-hoc nature of queries. The Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC) is a benchmarking challenge that encourages researchers and developers to push the boundaries in lifelog retrieval. For LSC'22, we develop FIRST 3.0, a novel and flexible system that leverages expressive cross-domain embeddings to enhance the searching process. Our system aims to adaptively capture the semantics of an image at different levels of detail. We also propose to augment our system with an external search engine to help our system with initial visual examples for unfamiliar concepts. Finally, we organize image data in hierarchical clusters based on their visual similarity and location to assist users in data exploration. Experiments show that our system is both fast and effective in handling various retrieval scenarios

An Asynchronous Scheme for the Distributed Evaluation of Interactive Multimedia Retrieval

Evaluation campaigns for interactive multimedia retrieval, such as the Video Browser Shodown (VBS) or the Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC), so far imposed constraints on both simultaneity and locality of all participants, requiring them to solve the same tasks in the same place, at the same time and under the same conditions. These constraints are in contrast to other evaluation campaigns that do not focus on interactivity, where participants can process the tasks in any place at any time. The recent travel restrictions necessitated the relaxation of the locality constraint of interactive campaigns, enabling participants to take place from an arbitrary location. Born out of necessity, this relaxation turned out to be a boon since it greatly simplified the evaluation process and enabled organisation of ad-hoc evaluations outside of the large campaigns. However, it also introduced an additional complication in cases where participants were spread over several time zones. In this paper, we introduce an evaluation scheme for interactive retrieval evaluation that relaxes both the simultaneity and locality constraints, enabling participation from any place at any time within a predefined time frame. This scheme, as implemented in the Distributed Retrieval Evaluation Server (DRES), enables novel ways of conducting interactive retrieval evaluation and bridged the gap between interactive campaigns and non-interactive ones