Towards Personalized Image Retrieval

International audienceThis paper describes an approach to personalized image indexing and retrieval. To tackle the issue of subjectivity in Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), users can define their own indexing vocabulary and make the system learn it. These indexing concepts may be both local (objects) and global (image ategories). The system guides the user in the selection of relevant training examples. Concept learning in the system is incremental and hierarchical: global concepts are built upon local concepts as well as low-level features. Similarity measures tuning is used to emphasize relevant features for a given concept. To illustrate the potential of this approach, an implementation of this model has been developed; preliminary results are given in this paper

The Outline of an 'Intelligent' Image Retrieval Engine

International audienceThe first image retrieval systems hold the advantage of being fully automatic, and thus scalable to large collections of images but are restricted to the representation of low-level aspects (e.g. colors, textures...) without considering the semantic content of images. This obviously compromises interaction, making it difficult for a user to query with precision. The growing need for 'intelligent' systems, i.e. being capable of bridging this semantic gap, leads to new architectures combining multiple characterizations of the image content. This paper presents SIR1, a promising high-level framework featuring semantics, signal color and spatial characterizations. It features a fully-textual query module based on a language manipulating both boolean and quantification operators, therefore making it possible for a user to request elaborate image scenes such as a "covered(mostly grey) sky" or "people in front of a building"

A Model for Weighting Image Objects in Home Photographs

International audienceThe paper presents a contribution to image indexing consisting in a weighting model for visible objects - or image objects - in home photographs. To improve its effectiveness this weighting model has been designed according to human perception criteria about what is estimated as important in photographs. Four basic hypotheses related to human perception are presented, and their validity is estimated as compared to actual observations from a user study. Finally a formal definition of this weighting model is presented and its consistence with the user study is evaluated

Integrating Perceptual Signal Features within a Multi-facetted Conceptual Model for Automatic Image Retrieval

International audienceThe majority of the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems are restricted to the representation of signal aspects, e.g. color, texture... without explicitly considering the semantic content of images. According to these approaches a sun, for example, is represented by an orange or yellow circle, but not by the term "sun". The signal-oriented solutions are fully automatic, and thus easily usable on substantial amounts of data, but they do not fill the existing gap between the extracted low-level features and semantic descriptions. This obviously penalizes qualitative and quantitative performances in terms of recall and precision, and therefore users' satisfaction. Another class of methods, which were tested within the framework of the Fermi-GC project, consisted in modeling the content of images following a sharp process of human-assisted indexing. This approach, based on an elaborate model of representation (the conceptual graph formalism) provides satisfactory results during the retrieval phase but is not easily usable on large collections of images because of the necessary human intervention required for indexing. The contribution of this paper is twofold: in order to achieve more efficiency as far as user interaction is concerned, we propose to highlight a bond between these two classes of image retrieval systems and integrate signal and semantic features within a unified conceptual framework. Then, as opposed to state-of-the-art relevance feedback systems dealing with this integration, we propose a representation formalism supporting this integration which allows us to specify a rich query language combining both semantic and signal characterizations. We will validate our approach through quantitative (recall-precision curves) evaluations

Dynamic Learning of Indexing Concepts for Home Image Retrieval

International audienceThis paper presents a component of a content based image retrieval system dedicated to let a user define the indexing terms used later during retrieval. A user inputs a indexing term name, image examples and counter-examples of the term,and the system learns a model of the concept as well as a similarity measure for this term. The similarity measure is based on weights reflecting the importance of each low-level feature extracted from the images. The system computes these weights using a genetic algorithm. Rating a particular similarity measure is done by clustering the examples and counter-examples using these weights and computing the quality of the obtained clusters. Experiments are conducted and results are presented on a set of 600 images

Photograph indexing and retrieval using star-graphs

International audienceWe present in this paper a relational approach for indexing and retrieving photographs from a collection. Instead of using simple keywords as an indexing language, we propose to use star-graphs as document descriptors. A star-graph is a conceptual graph that contains a single relation, with some concepts linked to it. They are elementary pieces of information describing combinations of concepts. We use star-graphs as descriptors - or index terms - for image content representation. This allows for relational indexing and expression of complex user needs, in comparison to classical text retrieval, where simple keywords are generally used as document descriptors. We present a document representation model, a weighting scheme for star-graphs inspired by the tf.idf used in text retrieval. We have applied our model to image retrieval, and show the system evaluation results

Ranking structured documents using utility theory in the Bayesian network retrieval model

In this paper a new method based on Utility and Decision theory is presented to deal with structured documents. The aim of the application of these methodologies is to refine a first ranking of structural units, generated by means of an Information Retrieval Model based on Bayesian Networks. Units are newly arranged in the new ranking by combining their posterior probabilities, obtained in the first stage, with the expected utility of retrieving them. The experimental work has been developed using the Shakespeare structured collection and the results show an improvement of the effectiveness of this new approach

A multi-layered Bayesian network model for structured document retrieval

New standards in document representation, like for example SGML, XML, and MPEG-7, compel Information Retrieval to design and implement models and tools to index, retrieve and present documents according to the given document structure. The paper presents the design of an Information Retrieval system for multimedia structured documents, like for example journal articles, e-books, and MPEG-7 videos. The system is based on Bayesian Networks, since this class of mathematical models enable to represent and quantify the relations between the structural components of the document. Some preliminary results on the system implementation are also presented

EURYDICE : A platform for unified access to documents

rédigé le 14 octobre 2001In this paper we present Eurydice, a platform dedicated to provide a unified gateway to documents. Its basic functionalities about collecting documents have been designed based on a long experience about the management of scientific documentation among large and demanding academic communities such as IMAG and INRIA. Besides the basic problem of accessing documents - which was of course the original and main motivation of the project - a great effort has been dedicated to the development of management functionalities which could help institutions to control, analyse the current situation about the use of the documentation, and finally to set a better ground for a documentation policy. Finally a great emphasis - and corresponding technical investment - has been put on the protection of property and reproduction rights both from the users' intitution side and from the editors' side

Personalizing Interactions with Information Systems

Personalization constitutes the mechanisms and technologies necessary to customize information access to the end-user. It can be defined as the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation tailored to the individual. In this chapter, we study personalization from the viewpoint of personalizing interaction. The survey covers mechanisms for information-finding on the web, advanced information retrieval systems, dialog-based applications, and mobile access paradigms. Specific emphasis is placed on studying how users interact with an information system and how the system can encourage and foster interaction. This helps bring out the role of the personalization system as a facilitator which reconciles the user’s mental model with the underlying information system’s organization. Three tiers of personalization systems are presented, paying careful attention to interaction considerations. These tiers show how progressive levels of sophistication in interaction can be achieved. The chapter also surveys systems support technologies and niche application domains