Innovative Evaluation System – IESM: An Architecture for the Database Management System for Mobile Application

As the mobile applications are constantly facing a rapid development in the recent years especially in the academic environment such as student response system [1-8] used in universities and other educational institutions; there has not been reported an effective and scalable Database Management System to support fast and reliable data storage and retrieval. This paper presents Database Management Architecture for an Innovative Evaluation System based on Mobile Learning Applications. The need for a relatively stable, independent and extensible data model for faster data storage and retrieval is analyzed and investigated. It concludes by emphasizing further investigation for high throughput so as to support multimedia data such as video clips, images and documents

Reference face graph for face recognition

Face recognition has been studied extensively; however, real-world face recognition still remains a challenging task. The demand for unconstrained practical face recognition is rising with the explosion of online multimedia such as social networks, and video surveillance footage where face analysis is of significant importance. In this paper, we approach face recognition in the context of graph theory. We recognize an unknown face using an external reference face graph (RFG). An RFG is generated and recognition of a given face is achieved by comparing it to the faces in the constructed RFG. Centrality measures are utilized to identify distinctive faces in the reference face graph. The proposed RFG-based face recognition algorithm is robust to the changes in pose and it is also alignment free. The RFG recognition is used in conjunction with DCT locality sensitive hashing for efficient retrieval to ensure scalability. Experiments are conducted on several publicly available databases and the results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods without any preprocessing necessities such as face alignment. Due to the richness in the reference set construction, the proposed method can also handle illumination and expression variation

Hybrid Information Retrieval Model For Web Images

The Bing Bang of the Internet in the early 90's increased dramatically the number of images being distributed and shared over the web. As a result, image information retrieval systems were developed to index and retrieve image files spread over the Internet. Most of these systems are keyword-based which search for images based on their textual metadata; and thus, they are imprecise as it is vague to describe an image with a human language. Besides, there exist the content-based image retrieval systems which search for images based on their visual information. However, content-based type systems are still immature and not that effective as they suffer from low retrieval recall/precision rate. This paper proposes a new hybrid image information retrieval model for indexing and retrieving web images published in HTML documents. The distinguishing mark of the proposed model is that it is based on both graphical content and textual metadata. The graphical content is denoted by color features and color histogram of the image; while textual metadata are denoted by the terms that surround the image in the HTML document, more particularly, the terms that appear in the tags p, h1, and h2, in addition to the terms that appear in the image's alt attribute, filename, and class-label. Moreover, this paper presents a new term weighting scheme called VTF-IDF short for Variable Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency which unlike traditional schemes, it exploits the HTML tag structure and assigns an extra bonus weight for terms that appear within certain particular HTML tags that are correlated to the semantics of the image. Experiments conducted to evaluate the proposed IR model showed a high retrieval precision rate that outpaced other current models.Comment: LACSC - Lebanese Association for Computational Sciences, http://www.lacsc.org/; International Journal of Computer Science & Emerging Technologies (IJCSET), Vol. 3, No. 1, February 201

Appling parallelism in image mining

Image mining deals with the study and development of new technologies that allow accomplishing this subject. A common mistake about image mining is identifying its scopes and limitations. Clearly it is different from computer vision and image processing areas. Image mining deals with the extraction of image patterns from a large collection of images, whereas the focus of computer vision and image processing is in understanding and/or extracting specific features from a single image. On the other hand it might be thought that it is much related to content-based retrieval area, since both deals with large image collections. Nevertheless, image mining goes beyond the simple fact of recovering relevant images, the goal is the discovery of image patterns that are significant in a given collection of images. As a result, an image mining systems implies lots of tasks to be done in a regular time. Images provide a natural source of parallelism; so the use of parallelism in every or some mining tasks might be a good option to reduce the cost and overhead of the whole image mining process. At this work we will try to draw the image minnig problem: its computational cost, and to propose a possible global or local parallel solution.Eje: Procesamiento Concurrente, Paralelo y DistribuidoRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Understanding the Usage and Requirements of the Photo Tagging System

The amount of personal photos is massively increasing and managing them effectively and efficiently requires new approaches and practices. This study analyses the users’ needs and their behaviour towards photo tagging in the context of a personal photo repository. Our results are from a qualitative study with 15 users. Study methods include a questionnaire and a task analy-sis approach in which we analyse and evaluate practices around semi-automated photo tagging. In the task analysis, we describe and use a photo tagging application called SmartImages for studying the actual tagging expe-rience. The results from the study indicate that photo tagging in personal collections is rarely used as it is considered too laborious. The task analysis with SmartImages made users consider tagging worthwhile and beneficial. The results propose changes to the implementation of tagging functionality in photo management applications. We conclude that better visibility of the tagging feature and introducing social elements would improve the usage and benefit of tagging. Providing automated tag suggestions that are comprehen-sible, conceptually relevant and the relation between the displayed tags and the photo is clear would make users more willing to engage with tagging ac-tivities. Addressing the mentioned issues would help the users in managing the increasing number of personal photos.Peer reviewe

Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

A scalable approach for content based image retrieval in cloud datacenter

The emergence of cloud datacenters enhances the capability of online data storage. Since massive data is stored in datacenters, it is necessary to effectively locate and access interest data in such a distributed system. However, traditional search techniques only allow users to search images over exact-match keywords through a centralized index. These techniques cannot satisfy the requirements of content based image retrieval (CBIR). In this paper, we propose a scalable image retrieval framework which can efficiently support content similarity search and semantic search in the distributed environment. Its key idea is to integrate image feature vectors into distributed hash tables (DHTs) by exploiting the property of locality sensitive hashing (LSH). Thus, images with similar content are most likely gathered into the same node without the knowledge of any global information. For searching semantically close images, the relevance feedback is adopted in our system to overcome the gap between low-level features and high-level features. We show that our approach yields high recall rate with good load balance and only requires a few number of hops