From media crossing to media mining

This paper reviews how the concept of Media Crossing has contributed to the advancement of the application domain of information access and explores directions for a future research agenda. These will include themes that could help to broaden the scope and to incorporate the concept of medium-crossing in a more general approach that not only uses combinations of medium-specific processing, but that also exploits more abstract medium-independent representations, partly based on the foundational work on statistical language models for information retrieval. Three examples of successful applications of media crossing will be presented, with a focus on the aspects that could be considered a first step towards a generalized form of media mining

VQS: Linking Segmentations to Questions and Answers for Supervised Attention in VQA and Question-Focused Semantic Segmentation

Rich and dense human labeled datasets are among the main enabling factors for the recent advance on vision-language understanding. Many seemingly distant annotations (e.g., semantic segmentation and visual question answering (VQA)) are inherently connected in that they reveal different levels and perspectives of human understandings about the same visual scenes --- and even the same set of images (e.g., of COCO). The popularity of COCO correlates those annotations and tasks. Explicitly linking them up may significantly benefit both individual tasks and the unified vision and language modeling. We present the preliminary work of linking the instance segmentations provided by COCO to the questions and answers (QAs) in the VQA dataset, and name the collected links visual questions and segmentation answers (VQS). They transfer human supervision between the previously separate tasks, offer more effective leverage to existing problems, and also open the door for new research problems and models. We study two applications of the VQS data in this paper: supervised attention for VQA and a novel question-focused semantic segmentation task. For the former, we obtain state-of-the-art results on the VQA real multiple-choice task by simply augmenting the multilayer perceptrons with some attention features that are learned using the segmentation-QA links as explicit supervision. To put the latter in perspective, we study two plausible methods and compare them to an oracle method assuming that the instance segmentations are given at the test stage.Comment: To appear on ICCV 201

Multimedia search without visual analysis: the value of linguistic and contextual information

This paper addresses the focus of this special issue by analyzing the potential contribution of linguistic content and other non-image aspects to the processing of audiovisual data. It summarizes the various ways in which linguistic content analysis contributes to enhancing the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and, as a consequence, to improving the effectiveness of conceptual media access tools. A number of techniques are presented, including the time-alignment of textual resources, audio and speech processing, content reduction and reasoning tools, and the exploitation of surface features

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

A Typographic Dilemma: Reconciling the old with the new using a new cross-disciplinary typographic framework

Current theory and vocabulary used to describe typographic practice and scholarship are based on a historically print-derived framework. As yet, no new paradigm has emerged to address the divergent path that screen-based typography is taking from its traditional print medium. Screen-based typography is becoming as common and widely used as its print counterpart. It is now timely to re-evaluate current typographic references and practices under these environments, which introduces a new visual language and form. This paper will attempt to present an alternate typographic framework to address these growing changes by appropriating concepts and knowledge from different disciplines. This alternate typographic framework has been informed through a study conducted as part of a research Doctorate in the School of Design at Northumbria University, UK. This paper posits that the current typographic framework derived from the print medium is no longer sufficient to address the growing differences between the print and screen media. In its place, an alternate cross-disciplinary typographic framework should be adopted for the successful integration and application of typography in screen-based interactive media. The development of this framework will focus mainly on three key characteristics of screen-based interactive media ¬¬– hypertext, interactivity and time-based motion – and will draw influences from disciplines such as film, computer gaming, interactive digital arts and hypertext fictions