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Lire SVN build for Java 1.5

Due to requests I took some time and built a Java 1.5 version instead of the 1.6 versions. A simple compile with 1.5 wouldn’t help as I use the swing layout classes of NetBeans (now integrated in Java 1.6), so imports have to be re-adjusted and the library has to be added. Furthermore I created an explicit build target in Caliph to create a 1.5 version of the cbir jar file. This snapshot works fine with MacOS (as far as I’ve heard) and on Windows.

Files:

• liredemo-svn-2008-05-29-jdk1.5.tar.bz2 [670k]
  
• liredemo-svn-2008-05-29-jdk1.5.zip [884k]
  

Caliph, Emir and Lire development switched to subversion

Today I did something I should have done a long time ago: I switched (within sf.net) from cvs to subversion. Now login, update and commit are much faster and development gets easier. If you are interested you can browse the repository here: http://caliph-emir.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/caliph-emir/. If you want to check out and get the code, then you can find the documentation on sf.net.

Statistics on Caliph, Emir and Lire

Today I created a presentation on Caliph and Emir and I looked up how long these open source projects are now part of my (online & research) life. In July 2004 I put the first open source version of Caliph & Emir online and ~ 6.700 downloads happened from then till now. Furthermore the Java Web Start files of Caliph and Emir were accessed about 1.300 times. Lire was more successful: Going online in 2006 it was ~3.600 times download till now.

Taking a look around I have to say that Caliph is still the only MPEG-7 tool for semantic descriptions. Due to the fact that it is a prototype (with virtually no productive use) i assume that there is currently no need for such a tool. Reported use is focused on MPEG-7 development and research projects. Lire on the other hand has a more active user base: I know several projects where Lire is used. Seems like there actually is a need for an open source Java library for content based image retrieval.

LIRe 0.5.4 Released

In Lire 0.5.4 some bugs were fixed: The scalable color descriptor (color histogram) was not compliant to the MPEG-7 standard, which is now fixed. The color only search was changed to use the color layout descriptor and a bug in the edge histogram descriptor was hunted down.

Note that you have to re-index your files: Your old index cannot be used with the new version as 2 descriptors have changed. Furthermore all binary files have been compiled with Java 6.0. So if you need a Java 1.5 version you’ll need to recompile yourself (ant build file is included) and include the swing layout class library from NetBeans.

The LireDemo GUI application has also been updated: A new function for creating image mosaics has been introduced and the indexing of digital photos is now faster than ever as only the EXIF thumbnails - if available - are used instead of the whole image.

Go to the LIRe page for download links and further information.

Caliph & Emir v0.9.25 released

Caliph & Emir 0.9.25 is mainly a maintainance release: There were some bugs in the content based image retrieval classes. Scalable Color descriptor extraction was fixed and yields now the same results as the MPEG-7 reference software. Furthermore ppm and bmp images are now supported. Note that Java 6.0 is required for the binary version and 1.5 for building it yourself.

The Scalable Color Descriptor was fixed: Now it matches the XM implementation (thanks to Fabrizio Falchi and Bastian Hoesch). EdgeHistogramImpl has also been updated according to a bug report & patch by Bastian Hoesch. Furthermore the DominantColor class was adapted based on suggestions by Janine Lachner. New feature is the support for ppm and bmp images.

Binaries, source and an installer for windows can be downloaded on sourceforge.net.

Lucene for Java 2.1.0 Released

The release of Lucene 2.1.0 has been announced recently. The new release includes bugfixes, performance improvements, new features and removed some deprecated things. You can find the whole list of changes in the CHANGES.txt file. Some new features of interest are:

• A new “Match All Documents” query option in QueryParser
• New methods fro handling updates in IndexWriter
• Support for leading wildcards in QueryParser

You can find the new release at lucene.apache.org/java.

Caliph & Emir 0.9.23 Released

This release focuses on the visualization of repositories and search results in Emir. Alt + mouse wheel now changes size of thumbnails in the visualization and the movement within the visualization has been fixed. It further includes library updates and a new demo mode (endless loop of iterative arrangement in visualization) in Emir.

The new release can be downloaded at sourceforge:

• CaliphEmir_v0.9.23-bin.tar.bz2
• CaliphEmir_v0.9.23-bin.zip
• CaliphEmirSetup_v0.9.23_build339.exe

Visualization Demo Video Online

The demo session on the 77th MPEG Meeting was quite a success, many people were interested in the visualization. Many talks about standardisation, surveillance and other things where visual analysis could be needed took place at the demo desk. After the demo session I was asked to record a video of the visualization of Emir. Well that was easy. I’ve published the video here, optional download here. >> Watch the video

Lire (Lucene Image REtrieval) 0.4 Released

The LIRE library allows the creation of a Lucene Index for content based image retrieval (CBIR). Furthermore methods for searching the index are provided. In Lire 0.4 support for weighting has been added to the image searcher module. With weighting the importance of texture, colour and colour distribution for image retrieval can be specified. The new feature is described in detail in the online documentation and the API docs.

Download:

• Lire-0.4.tar.bz2 (833072 Bytes)
• Lire-0.4.zip (926042 Bytes)

Continue reading Lire (Lucene Image REtrieval) 0.4 Released…

Nice review on Caliph and Emir has been posted …

Within the digitizationblog at http://digitizationblog.interoperating.info/ a very nice review / pointer on Caliph & Emir has been published. About Caliph and Emir it was said that [...] nicely illustrate a useful implementation of MPEG-7 [...] and that there are very few tools showing actual power of MPEG-7, which is a statement I fully agree with.