SemanticMetadata.net

Links turning up in my feed :)

Today and yesterday all in all 3 links from del.icio.us turned up in the news feed. Sorry for them, I haven’t published them. Unfortunately I have not logged in to my del.icio.us account for such a long time that my account has been deleted and re-enabled by another user. So it’s not a security breach, but my own fault. One needs to be active in Web 2.0

LIRe presentation and poster at ACM MM 2011

Just finished my presentation at ACM MM’s open source competition in 2011. Many interested researchers and developers came by to discuss ideas and developments. I’m looking forward to turning many of those idea into code

For those of you interested in the poster I uploaded it here.

I also uploaded the presentation to slideshare.

Searching with Lire in big datasets

Having received several complaints about the slowness of Lire when searching in 100k+ documents I took my time to write a small how to to explain approaches for search in big (relatively) data sets.

Lire has the ability to create indexes with lots of different features (descriptors, like RGB color histograms or CEDD). While this opens the opportunity to flexibility at search time as we can select the feature at the time we create a query, the index tends to get bigger and bigger and searcher take longer and longer.

With a data set of 121,379 images the index created with the features selected for default in Lire Demo has a size of 14,3 GB on the disk. In contrast to that an index just storing the CEDD feature along with the image identifier has a size of 29 MB.

Due to the size of the index also linear search tends to get slower. While for the index stripped down to the CEDD feature and the identifier searching takes (on a AMD Quad-Core computer with 4GB RAM and Java 1.7) roughly 0.33 seconds, searching the big index takes 7 minutes and 3 seconds.

So if you want to index and search big data sets (> 100.000 images for instance) I recommend to

• select which features you need,
• create the index with a minimum set of features, and
• eventually split the index per feature and select the index on the fly instead of the feature
• also you can load the index into RAM

For more on loading the index to RAM and the option to use local features read on in the developer wiki.

Lire publication in the top 10 downloads of ACM SIGMM

As to be found in this month’s SIGMM record, which is the electronic SIGMM newsletter, a publication about Lire is in the top 10 downloads of the ACM special interest group on multimedia for September 2011.

I co-authored the paper with Savvas Chatzichristofis:

Mathias Lux, Savvas A. Chatzichristofis. Lire: lucene image retrieval: an extensible java CBIR library. In ACM Multimedia 2008

It’s also the paper I recommend to include in references if Lire is used within a scientific publication, so my thanks also go to the authors citing and therefore pointing to our work!

Lire and Lire Demo v 0.9 released

I just released Lire and Lire Demo in version 0.9 on sourceforge.net. Basically it’s the alpha version with additional speed and stability enhancements for bag of visual words (BoVW) indexing. While this has already been possible in earlier versions I re-furbished vocabulary creation (k-means clustering) and indexing to support up to 4 CPU cores. I also integrated a function to add documents to BoVW indexes incrementally. So a list of major changes since Lire 0.8 includes

• Major speed-up due to change and re-write of indexing strategies for local features
• Auto color correlation and color histogram features improved
• Re-ranking filter based on global features and LSA
• Parallel bag of visual words indexing and search supporting SURF and SIFT including incremental index updates (see also in the wiki)
• Added functionality to Lire Demo including support for new Lire features and a new result list view

Download and try:

• Source and binaries (or as tar.bz2)
• Lire Demo

Lire Demo 0.9 alpha 2 just released

Finally I found some time to go through Lire and fix several of the — for me — most annoying bugs. While this is still work in progress I have a preview with the demo uploaded to sf.net. New features are:

• Auto Color Correlogram and Color Histogram features improved
• Re-ranking based on different features supported
• Enhanced results view
• Much faster indexing (parallel, use -server switch for your JVM)
• Much faster search (re-write of the searhc code in Lire)
• New developer menu for faster switching of search features
• Re-ranking of results based on latent semantic analysis

You can find the updated Lire Demo along with a windows launcher here, Mac and Linux users please run it using “java -jar … ” or double click (if your windows manager supports actions like that

• Download Liredemo v0.9 alpha 2

The source is — of course — GPL and available in the SVN.

ACM Multimedia 2011 Open Source Software Competition

The Open-Source Software Competition is an integral part of the ACM Multimedia program. The ACM Multimedia 2011 Open-Source Software Competition is the eighth running competition. It is mainly intended to celebrate and encourage the contribution of researchers, software developers and educators to advance the field by providing the community with implementations of codecs, middleware, frameworks, toolkits, libraries, multimedia players, applications, authoring tools, and other multimedia software. This year, we encourage submission of instructional open source software designed for educational use in teaching multimedia-related courses at undergraduate or graduate level. Such software should be designed with educational suitability in mind (e.g., can be used as a basis for programming assignments, laboratory exercises, and class projects).

Submission deadline: May 9th, 2011

Find the full call and additional information here.

MMM 2012 Call for Special Session Proposals

International Conference on Multimedia Modeling 2012
Jan. 4-6, 2012, Klagenfurt, Austria
http://mmm2012.org/special-sessions/

The International MultiMedia Modeling Conference (MMM) is a leading international conference for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all MMM related areas. MMM2012 welcomes proposals for special sessions focusing on specific new challenges in multimedia research. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• 3D object and face retrieval
• Annotation and multimedia metadata
• Cross-modal and cross-media analysis and modeling
• Events and actions in multimedia
• Multimedia in interactive entertainment
• Music and audio content analysis
• Modeling user context in multimedia retrieval

Also the topics mentioned in the conference call for papers in the fields of multimedia content analysis, multimedia signal processing and communications, and multimedia applications and services (see also http://mmm2012.org/call-for-papers/) are of interest for the special session.

A typical MMM special session features 5-6 contribution discussing the proposed topic. The proposal should include the following information:

• Tentative title of the proposed special session
• Names and affiliations of the organizers (including brief bio and contact information)
• Session abstract (statement of the significance of topic)
• List of potential contributors (together with tentative paper titles) who agree to submit a paper if the proposal is accepted

Proposals will be evaluated based on the timeliness and significance of the topic, as well as the qualifications of the organizers and the tentative papers proposed.

Papers of accepted special sessions need to be submitted using the MMM2012 conference submission system. Special session organizers will be responsible for managing the review process of the papers submitted to their special sessions. All special session papers will be included in the conference proceedings.

Important dates:

• Proposal submission: June 6, 2011
• Notifications: June 20, 2011
• Papers submission: July 22, 2011

Special session co-chairs:

• Marco Bertini, Università di Firenze, Italy, bertini<at>dsi.unifi.it
• Mathias Lux, Klagenfurt University, Austria, mlux<at>itec.uni-klu.ac.at

For more information, please visit http://www.mmm2012.org/

My Talk at BarCamp / CreateCamp Klagenfurt

On Saturday I gave a talk on LIRe & the art of content based image retrieval at the 5th BarCamp in Klagenfurt. Although few people followed my talk we had lively and interesting discussion, especially on the application in the site politinserate.at. If you are interested, find the slides on SlideShare (in german, sorry folks).

Final Call for Papers: Special Issue on Searching Speech

ACM Transactions on Information Systems is soliciting contributions to a special issue on the topic of “Searching Speech”. The special issue will be devoted to algorithms and systems that use speech recognition and other types of spoken audio processing techniques to retrieve information, and, in particular, to provide access to spoken audio content or multimedia content with a speech track.

Submission Deadline: 1 March 2011

The field of spoken content indexing and retrieval has a long history dating back to the development of the first broadcast news retrieval systems in the 1990s. More recently, however, work on searching speech has been moving towards spoken audio that is produced spontaneously and in conversational settings. In contrast to the planned speech that is typical for the broadcast news domain, spontaneous, conversational speech is characterized by high variability and the lack of inherent structure. Domains in which researchers face such challenges include: lectures, meetings, interviews, debates, conversational broadcast (e.g., talk-shows), podcasts, call center recordings, cultural heritage archives, social video on the Web, spoken natural language queries and the Spoken Web.
We invite the submission of papers that describe research in the following areas:

• Integration of information retrieval algorithms with speech recognition and audio analysis techniques
• Interfaces and techniques to improve user interaction with speech collections
• Indexing diverse, large scale collections
• Search effectiveness and efficiency, including exploitation of additional information sources

For more information see http://tois.acm.org/announcement.html