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

Subjective age of acquisition norms for 1604 English words by Spanish L2 speakers of English and their relationship with lexico-semantic, affective, sociolinguistic and proficiency variables

Psycholinguistic studies have shown that there are many variables implicated in language comprehension and production. At the lexical level, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), the estimate of the age at which a word is acquired, is key for stimuli selection in psycholinguistic studies. AoA databases in English are often used when testing a variety of phenomena in second language (L2) speakers of English. However, these have limitations, as the norms are not provided by the target population (L2 speakers of English) but by native English speakers. In this study, we asked native Spanish L2 speakers of English to provide subjective AoA ratings for 1604 English words, and investigated whether factors related to 14 lexico-semantic and afective variables, both in Spanish and English, and to the speakers’ profle (i.e., sociolinguistic variables and L2 profciency), were related to the L2 AoA ratings. We used boosted regression trees, an advanced form of regression analysis based on machine learning and boosting algorithms, to analyse the data. Our results showed that the model accounted for a relevant proportion of deviance (58.56%), with the English AoA provided by native English speakers being the strongest predictor for L2 AoA. Additionally, L2 AoA correlated with L2 reaction times. Our database is a useful tool for the research community running psycholinguistic studies in L2 speakers of English. It adds knowledge about which factors—linked to the characteristics of both the linguistic stimuli and the speakers—afect L2 subjective AoA. The database and the data can be downloaded from: https://osf.io/gr8xd/?view_only=73b01dccbedb4d7897c8d104d3d68c46Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. This research was supported by the “Proyectos de I+D de Jóvenes Doctores” funded by the Autonomous University of Madrid and the Community of Madrid (Title: "The acquisition and development of afective vocabulary in a second language from childhood to adolescence”; reference SI3/PJI/2021-00249) awarded to Sara Rodriguez-Cuadrado; by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under Grants PGC2018-098558-B-I00 to José A. Hinojosa, and PID2019-107206GB-I00 and RED2018-102615-T to Pilar Ferré, PID2019-108092GA-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 to Carlos Romero-Rivas, and PID2019-106868GB-I00 to Paz Suárez-Coalla; by Comunidad de Madrid under Grant H2019/HUM-5705 to José A. Hinojosa, and Universitat Rovira i Virgili under Grant 2019PFR-URVB2-32 to Pilar Ferré. Lucía Sabater was hired by the aforementioned grant PGC2018-098558-B-I00 awarded to José A. Hinojos

Giving eyes to ICT!, or How does a computer recognize a cow?

Het door Schouten en andere onderzoekers op het CWI ontwikkelde systeem berust op het beschrijven van beelden met behulp van fractale meetkunde. De menselijke waarneming blijkt mede daardoor zo efficiënt omdat zij sterk werkt met gelijkenissen. Het ligt dus voor de hand het te zoeken in wiskundige methoden die dat ook doen. Schouten heeft daarom beeldcodering met behulp van 'fractals' onderzocht. Fractals zijn zelfgelijkende meetkundige figuren, opgebouwd door herhaalde transformatie (iteratie) van een eenvoudig basispatroon, dat zich daardoor op steeds kleinere schalen vertakt. Op elk niveau van detaillering lijkt een fractal op zichzelf (Droste-effect). Met fractals kan men vrij eenvoudig bedrieglijk echte natuurvoorstellingen maken. Fractale beeldcodering gaat ervan uit dat het omgekeerde ook geldt: een beeld effectief opslaan in de vorm van de basispatronen van een klein aantal fractals, samen met het voorschrift hoe het oorspronkelijke beeld daaruit te reconstrueren. Het op het CWI in samenwerking met onderzoekers uit Leuven ontwikkelde systeem is mede gebaseerd op deze methode. ISBN 906196502

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

Visual Propaganda and Extremism in the Online Environment

Visual images have been a central component of propaganda for as long as propaganda has been produced. But recent developments in communication and information technologies have given terrorist and extremist groups options and abilities they never would have been able to come close to even 5 or 10 years ago. There are terrorist groups who, with very little initial investment, are making videos that are coming so close to the quality of BBC or CNN broadcasts that the difference is meaningless, and with access to the web they have instantaneous access to a global audience. Given the broad social science consensus on the power of visual images relative to that of words, the strategic implications of these groups’ sophistication in the use of images in the online environment is carefully considered in a variety of contexts by the authors in this collection.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1942/thumbnail.jp

Les mixtures de Dirichlet et leurs apports pour la classification et la recherche d'images par le contenu

Le développement de la médecine moderne dans le domaine des techniques de diagnostic comme la radiologie, l'histopathologie et la tomographie avait comme résultat l'explosion du nombre et de l'importance des images médicales sauvegardées par la majorité des hôpitaux. Afin d'aider les médecins à confirmer leurs diagnostics, plusieurs systèmes de recherche d'images médicales ont vu le jour. La conception de ces systèmes présente plusieurs étapes. Nous pensons que le résumé des bases de données d'images est une étape importante dans chaque système de recherche. En effet, la catégorisation d'une base de données d'images facilite énormément la recherche et permet de localiser les images voulues en un minimum de temps. Dans ce mémoire, nous étudions en un premier temps, les différents problèmes communs à tous les systèmes de recherche d'images à savoir l'indexation, l'extraction des caractéristiques, la définition des mesures de similarités et le retour de pertinence. Nous étudions aussi d'autres catégories de problèmes spécifiques à la recherche d'images. Cette étude est complétée par une analyse des systèmes existants les plus connus. Dans la deuxième partie du mémoire, nous nous intéressons aux mixtures de Dirichlet et comment on peut les exploiter pour la classification, en particulier le résumé des bases de données d'images. Contrairement aux approches classiques qui considèrent la loi normale comme densité, nous utilisons une généralisation de la Dirichlet pour l'adapter plus aux problèmes réels. Notre approche est traduite par un modèle mathématique basé sur le maximum de vraisemblance et la méthode de Fisher. Une interprétation très intéressante de notre méthode, basée sur la statistique géométrique, est donnée. Finalement, nous présentons des évaluations contextuelles et non-contextuelles, qui prouvent la validité de notre méthode