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Open Source @ ACM Multimedia 2007

This year there was also an open source software contest at the ACM MM. 4 different projects were selected to be presented in a special session:

• HOP is a framework for generating multimedia web applications easily. They introduce a new model (brokers in between web servers and clients) and a new programming language.
• ADVENE is a video annotation (GTK, VLC & ffmpeg) tool that allows a whole lot of different annotation types and views on metadata and content itself. Unfortunately it doesn’t support MPEG-7.
• GPAC is an open source multimedia framework famous for its support of scene based multimedia content (LASER, MPEG-4, etc.)
• Xface is meant to allow the creation of MPEG-4 based talking heads.

It’s really nice to see that academic effort and EU funding also results in open source projects so other researchers can built on top of other research results!

Here @ ACM Multimedia 2007

Currently listening to the last talk of this day for me I’ll try to put my impressions together to a full image of the first two days of the ACM Multimedia 2007. The location is quite charming: Augsburg is nice and the university here has a lot of nice ‘landscape’ (~green nothingness) around

The picture to the right shows W. Wahlster doing his keynote yesterday. While it was impressive how many parallel and interconnected  research activities can do with such an amount of  funding the content of the talk was more like selling an EU IP

Todays first keynote was rather cool: R. Fageth from CeWe talked about their company and gave lots of impressive figures how people submit photos for printing. They for instance receive 4 TB of digital photos via upload for printing each day, while the mean image maximum age of an order is ~80 days.

The overall impression on the conference is: Many good contributions and lots of demos & posters to see. Many - but not all - present novelties or interesting ideas.  Also interestingis the mere number of posters/demos/papers dealing with social media. Seems to hit the research

Content Based Image Resizing (GPL, Java): Update to v4

I’ve just uploaded a new version of the seam carving application (v2 v3 v4). There is a performance increase and the result should be smoother now. It’s either available as Java Webstart or as compiled jar file to start the Swing GUI. Sources are included, license is GPL, Java 1.6 needed.

• Java Webstart: ImageSeams
• Download binaries & source v2 (43k)
• Download binaries & source v3 (Java Swing GUI App, 54k)
• Download binaries & source v4 (Java Swing GUI App): SeamCarving-v4.zip (66K) or SeamCarving-v4.tar.bz2 (57k)
• Download Windows binary (Java Swing GUI App with Windows launcher, Java 1.6 needed, 243k)

What does this application do?

ImageSeams accepts JPG and PNG images as input and re-targets the image. This means it cuts out the not interesting parts of an image automatically. The application is based on the findings of this group described in this paper. A visual introduction of the original application is given in this video.

Changes:

• Bugfix: Bug fixed in seams backtracking, results are smoother now
• Feature: Image can now be scrolled
• Feature: About dialog showing version
• Change: Speed up in image repaint: ~30% ~50% performance gain
• Change: Icons for seam carving replaced
• Chang: Animation is now smoother

Small tutorial:

• Load an image with the leftmost button (jpg and png will work fine, try to use images not bigger than 800×800 for a start)
• Set the preferred size using the spinners (Do not forget to hit enter if you type it in, otherwise Java won’t recognize it)
• Hit the 2nd button in the tool bar and observe the effect
• Tryout the image brushing (click and drag on the image) to retain certain parts (e.g. faces) within the image
• Switch to the remove brush if you want to remove parts of the image before resizing.

NetBeans 6.0 Beta 1 Released

Yesterday the first beta of NetBeans 6.0 was released. I could not withstand and installed it - of course The installer (Linux, Ubuntu Feisty) worked like a charm. Startup seemed somewhat faster, the looks are clean and good (nothing like the thing with M9 anymore). The editor now responds faster than in the last milestone and is therefore more usable. Looks like NetBeans is on its way.

Another comment: Why bother with NetBeans if they are somewhat behind with features and ease-of-use? From the viewpoint of an application developer NetBeans offers some very interesting features one might search in other databases. There is the really cool GUI editor and the database support out of the box. Furthermore they have a profiler built in (for free).

Just some words on the TIR 07 (Workshop Report)

Last Monday I’ve been at the Text Information Retrieval workshop, taking place in the Regensburg University in context of the DEXA conference. Benn Stein - as always - did a very good job on organizing the workshop. There were 11 papers accepted and the overall quality was high. All paper can be found online here.

Personally I’d recommend the following if you want to take a look at the highlights of the workshop:

• Author Identification Using Imbalanced and Limited Training Texts - E. Stamatatos presents a new distance function for author identification. He gave a very good overview on this topic in his talk.
• An MDA Approach to Implement Personal IR Tools - Meyer zu Eissen and B. Stein show their architecture for modular search engines, which aims to formalize and simplify the construction of search engines and retrieval applications through the use of UML.

Furthermore I also presented a paper there: Aspects of Broad Folksonomies, which I’ve done together in constant collaboration with Michael Granitzer and Roman Kern. The slides are also online here.