Semantic concept detection in imbalanced datasets based on different under-sampling strategies

Semantic concept detection is a very useful technique for developing powerful retrieval or filtering systems for multimedia data. To date, the methods for concept detection have been converging on generic classification schemes. However, there is often imbalanced dataset or rare class problems in classification algorithms, which deteriorate the performance of many classifiers. In this paper, we adopt three “under-sampling” strategies to handle this imbalanced dataset issue in a SVM classification framework and evaluate their performances on the TRECVid 2007 dataset and additional positive samples from TRECVid 2010 development set. Experimental results show that our well-designed “under-sampling” methods (method SAK) increase the performance of concept detection about 9.6% overall. In cases of extreme imbalance in the collection the proposed methods worsen the performance than a baseline sampling method (method SI), however in the majority of cases, our proposed methods increase the performance of concept detection substantially. We also conclude that method SAK is a promising solution to address the SVM classification with not extremely imbalanced datasets

TRECVid 2011 Experiments at Dublin City University

This year the iAd-DCU team participated in three of the assigned TRECVid 2011 tasks; Semantic Indexing (SIN), Interactive Known-Item Search (KIS) and Multimedia Event Detection (MED). For the SIN task we presented three full runs using global features, local features and fusion of global, local features and relationships between concepts respectively. The evaluation results show that local features achieve better performance, with marginal gains found when introducing global features and relationships between concepts. With regard to our KIS submission, similar to our 2010 KIS experiments, we have implemented an iPad interface to a KIS video search tool. The aim of this year’s experimentation was to evaluate different display methodologies for KIS interaction. For this work, we integrate a clustering element for keyframes, which operates over MPEG-7 features using k-means clustering. In addition, we employ concept detection, not simply for search, but as a means of choosing most representative keyframes for ranked items. For our experiments we compare the baseline non-clustering system to a clustering system on a topic by topic basis. Finally, for the first time this year the iAd group at DCU has been involved in the MED Task. Two techniques are compared, employing low-level features directly and using concepts as intermediate representations. Evaluation results show promising initial results when performing event detection using concepts as intermediate representations

Search and hyperlinking task at MediaEval 2012

The Search and Hyperlinking Task was one of the Brave New Tasks at MediaEval 2012. The Task consisted of two subtasks which focused on search and linking in retrieval from a collection of semi-professional video content. These tasks followed up on research carried out within the MediaEval 2011 Rich Speech Retrieval (RSR) Task and the VideoCLEF 2009 Linking Task

Semantic levels of domain-independent commonsense knowledgebase for visual indexing and retrieval applications

Building intelligent tools for searching, indexing and retrieval applications is needed to congregate the rapidly increasing amount of visual data. This raised the need for building and maintaining ontologies and knowledgebases to support textual semantic representation of visual contents, which is an important block in these applications. This paper proposes a commonsense knowledgebase that forms the link between the visual world and its semantic textual representation. This domain-independent knowledge is provided at different levels of semantics by a fully automated engine that analyses, fuses and integrates previous commonsense knowledgebases. This knowledgebase satisfies the levels of semantic by adding two new levels: temporal event scenarios and psycholinguistic understanding. Statistical properties and an experiment evaluation, show coherency and effectiveness of the proposed knowledgebase in providing the knowledge needed for wide-domain visual applications

Descriptor Optimization for Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval

International audienceIn this paper, we propose and evaluate a method for optimizing descriptors used for content-based multimedia indexing and retrieval. A large variety of descriptors are commonly used for this purpose. However, the most efficient ones often have characteristics preventing them to be easily used in large scale systems. They may have very high dimensionality (up to tens of thousands dimensions) and/or be suited for a distance costly to compute (e.g. fflchi-square). The proposed method combines a PCA-based dimensionality reduction with pre- and post-PCA non-linear transformations. The resulting transformation is globally optimized. The produced descriptors have a much lower dimensionality while performing at least as well, and often significantly better, with the Euclidean distance than the original high dimensionality descriptors with their optimal distance. The method has been validated and evaluated for a variety of descriptors using TRECVid 2010 semantic indexing task data. It has then be applied at large scale for the TRECVid 2012 semantic indexing task on tens of descriptors of various types and with initial dimensionalities from 15 up to 32,768. The same transformation can be used also for multimedia retrieval in the context of query by example and/or relevance feedback

Searching for videos on Apple iPad and iPhone

In this demonstration we introduce our content-based video search system which runs as an app on the Apple iPad or iPhone. Our work on video search is motivated by the need to introduce content-based video search techniques, which are currently the preserve of the research community, to the larger YouTube generation. It was with this in mind, that we have developed a simple but engaging content based video search engine which uses an iPad or iPhone app as the front-end user interface. Our app supports the three common modes for content-based video search: text search, concept search and image-similarity search. Our iPad system was evaluated as part of the TRECVid 2010 evaluation campaign where we compared the performance of novice versus expert users

Latent Fisher Discriminant Analysis

Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is a well-known method for dimensionality reduction and classification. Previous studies have also extended the binary-class case into multi-classes. However, many applications, such as object detection and keyframe extraction cannot provide consistent instance-label pairs, while LDA requires labels on instance level for training. Thus it cannot be directly applied for semi-supervised classification problem. In this paper, we overcome this limitation and propose a latent variable Fisher discriminant analysis model. We relax the instance-level labeling into bag-level, is a kind of semi-supervised (video-level labels of event type are required for semantic frame extraction) and incorporates a data-driven prior over the latent variables. Hence, our method combines the latent variable inference and dimension reduction in an unified bayesian framework. We test our method on MUSK and Corel data sets and yield competitive results compared to the baseline approach. We also demonstrate its capacity on the challenging TRECVID MED11 dataset for semantic keyframe extraction and conduct a human-factors ranking-based experimental evaluation, which clearly demonstrates our proposed method consistently extracts more semantically meaningful keyframes than challenging baselines.Comment: 12 page

Quaero at TRECVID 2013: Semantic Indexing and Instance Search

International audienceThe Quaero group is a consortium of French and German organizations working on Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval1. LIG participated to the semantic indexing main task, localization task and concept pair task. LIG also participated to the organization of this task. This paper describes these participations which are quite similar to our previous year's participations. For the semantic indexing main task, our approach uses a six-stages processing pipelines for computing scores for the likelihood of a video shot to contain a target concept. These scores are then used for producing a ranked list of images or shots that are the most likely to contain the target concept. The pipeline is composed of the following steps: descriptor extraction, descriptor optimization, classiffication, fusion of descriptor variants, higher-level fusion, and re-ranking. We used a number of different descriptors and a hierarchical fusion strategy. We also used conceptual feedback by adding a vector of classiffication score to the pool of descriptors. The best Quaero run has a Mean Inferred Average Precision of 0.2848, which ranked us 2nd out of 26 participants. We also co-organized the TRECVid SIN 2013 task and collaborative annotation

IRIM at TRECVID 2011: Semantic Indexing and Instance Search

12 pages - TRECVID workshop notebook papers/slides available at http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/tvpubs/tv.pubs.org.htmlInternational audienceThe IRIM group is a consortium of French teams work- ing on Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval. This paper describes its participation to the TRECVID 2011 se- mantic indexing and instance search tasks. For the semantic indexing task, our approach uses a six-stages processing pipelines for computing scores for the likeli- hood of a video shot to contain a target concept. These scores are then used for producing a ranked list of im- ages or shots that are the most likely to contain the tar- get concept. The pipeline is composed of the following steps: descriptor extraction, descriptor optimization, classification, fusion of descriptor variants, higher-level fusion, and re-ranking. We evaluated a number of dif- ferent descriptors and tried different fusion strategies. The best IRIM run has a Mean Inferred Average Pre- cision of 0.1387, which ranked us 5th out of 19 partic- ipants. For the instance search task, we we used both object based query and frame based query. We formu- lated the query in standard way as comparison of visual signatures either of object with parts of DB frames or as a comparison of visual signatures of query and DB frames. To produce visual signatures we also used two apporaches: the first one is the baseline Bag-Of-Visual- Words (BOVW) model based on SURF interest point descriptor; the second approach is a Bag-Of-Regions (BOR) model that extends the traditional notion of BOVW vocabulary not only to keypoint-based descrip- tors but to region based descriptors