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

09101 Abstracts Collection -- Interactive Information Retrieval

From 01.03. to 06.03.2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09101 ``Interactive Information Retrieval \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Integrating information seeking and information structuring: spatial hypertext as an interface to the digital library.

Information seeking is the task of finding documents that satisfy the information needs of a person or organisation. Digital Libraries are one means of providing documents to meet the information needs of their users - i.e. as a resource to support information seeking. Therefore, research into the activity of information seeking is key to the development and understanding of digital libraries. Information structuring is the activity of organising documents found in the process of information seeking. Information structuring can be seen as either part of information seeking, or as a sepárate, complementary activity. It is a task performed by the seeker themselves and targeted by them to support their understanding and the management of later seeking activity. Though information structuring is an important task, it receives sparse support in current digital library Systems. Spatial hypertexts are computer software Systems that have been specifically been developed to support information structuring. However, they seldom are connected to Systems that support information seeking. Thus to day, the two inter-related activities of information seeking and information structuring have been supported by disjoint computer Systems. However, a variety of research strongly indicates that in physical environments, information seeking and information structuring are closely inter-related activities. Given this connection, this thesis explores whether a similar relationship can be found in electronic information seeking environments. However, given the absence of a software system that supports both activities well, there is an immédiate practical problem. In this thesis, I introduce an integrated information seeking and structuring System, called Garnet, that provides a spatial hypertext interface that also supports information seeking in a digital library. The opportunity of supporting information seeking by the artefacts of information structuring is explored in the Garnet system, drawing on the benefits previously found in supporting one information seeking activity with the artefacts of another. Garnet and its use are studied in a qualitative user study that results in the comparison of user behaviour in a combined electronic environment with previous studies in physical environments. The response of participants to using Garnet is reported, particularly regarding their perceptions of the combined system and the quality of the interaction. Finally, the potential value of the artefacts of information structuring to support information seeking is also evaluated

INVISQUE as a tool for intelligence analysis: the construction of explanatory narratives

We report an exploratory user-study in which a group of civil servants with experience of, or involvement in, intelligence analysis used the tool INVISQUE to address a problem using the 2011 VAST dataset. INVISQUE uses a visual metaphor that combines searching, clustering and sorting of document surrogates with free-form manipulation on an infinite canvas. We were interested in exposing the behaviours and related cognitive strategies that users would employ to better understand how this and similar environments might better support intelligence type work. Our results include the observation that the search and spatial features of the system supported participants in establishing, elaborating and systematically evaluating explanatory narratives that accounted for the data. Also, visual persistence at the interface allowed them to keep track of searches and to re-find documents when their importance became apparent. We conclude with reflections on our findings and propose a set of guidelines for developing systems that support sensemaking

Multimedia resource discovery

This chapter examines the challenges and opportunities of Multimedia Information Retrieval and corresponding search engine applications. Computer technology has changed our access to information tremendously: We used to search authors or titles (which we had to know) in library cards in order to locate relevant books; now we can issue keyword searches within the full text of whole book repositories in order to identify authors, titles and locations of relevant books. What about the corresponding challenge of finding multimedia by fragments, examples and excerpts? Rather than asking for a music piece by artist and title, can we hum its tune to find it? Can doctors submit scans of a patient to identify medically similar images of diagnosed cases in a database? Can your mobile phone take a picture of a statue and tell you about its artist and significance via a service that it sends this picture to? In an attempt to answer some of these questions we get to know basic concepts of multimedia resource discovery technologies for a number of different query and document types: piggy-back text search, i.e., reducing the multimedia to pseudo text documents; automated annotation of visual components; content-based retrieval where the query is an image; and fingerprinting to match near duplicates. Some of the research challenges are given by the semantic gap between the simple pixel properties computers can readily index and high-level human concepts; related to this is an inherent technological limitation of automated annotation of images from pixels alone. Other challenges are given by polysemy, i.e., the many meanings and interpretations that are inherent in visual material and the corresponding wide range of a user’s information need. This chapter demonstrates how these challenges can be tackled by automated processing and machine learning and by utilising the skills of the user, for example through browsing or through a process that is called relevance feedback, thus putting the user at centre stage. The latter is made easier by “added value” technologies, exemplified here by summaries of complex multimedia objects such as TV news, information visualisation techniques for document clusters, visual search by example, and methods to create browsable structures within the collection