Symbiosis between the TRECVid benchmark and video libraries at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Audiovisual archives are investing in large-scale digitisation efforts of their analogue holdings and, in parallel, ingesting an ever-increasing amount of born- digital files in their digital storage facilities. Digitisation opens up new access paradigms and boosted re-use of audiovisual content. Query-log analyses show the shortcomings of manual annotation, therefore archives are complementing these annotations by developing novel search engines that automatically extract information from both audio and the visual tracks. Over the past few years, the TRECVid benchmark has developed a novel relationship with the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision (NISV) which goes beyond the NISV just providing data and use cases to TRECVid. Prototype and demonstrator systems developed as part of TRECVid are set to become a key driver in improving the quality of search engines at the NISV and will ultimately help other audiovisual archives to offer more efficient and more fine-grained access to their collections. This paper reports the experiences of NISV in leveraging the activities of the TRECVid benchmark

A flexible image retrieval framework

This paper discusses a framework for image retrieval. Most current systems are based on a single technique for feature extraction and similarity search. Each technique has its advantages and drawbacks concerning the result quality. Usually they cover one or two certain features of the image, e.g. histograms or shape information. The proposed framework is designed to be highly flexible, even if performance may suffer. The aim is to give people a platform to implement almost any kind of retrieval issues very quickly, whether it is content based or somehing else. The second advantage of the framework is the possibility to change retrieval characteristics within the program completely. This allows users to configure the ranking process as needed

Fire exclusion effects on riparian forest dynamics in southwestern Oregon

Euro-American settlement and organized fire suppression have been associated with structural and compositional changes in many upland forests of the western United States, but little is known about the impacts on riparian forests, portions of the landscape protected for habitat and water quality. In this study, we used dendro-ecological methods to characterize the pre-settlement disturbance and tree recruitment processes of riparian forests in the Rogue River basin of southwestern Oregon and to identify changes to the forest structure and composition post-settlement. Our results suggest riparian forests in our study area developed with frequent disturbance by fire and that Euro-American land management shifted these forests onto a new successional trajectory. Our findings indicate the current hands-off management regime for riparian forests under the Northwest Forest Plan will continue along this altered trajectory and have ecologically undesirable consequences. We suggest that the restoration of pre-settlement forest dynamics in fire-prone forests of southwestern Oregon will be most effective where it includes density reductions in overstory trees and prescribed fire in both upland and riparian forests.This is the authors' peer-reviewed final manuscript. The published version is copyrighted by Elsevier and can be found here: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/forest-ecology-and-management/#descriptionKeywords: Riparian, Fire suppression, Douglas-fir, Fire ecology, Stand structur