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Lire Nightly Builds

Obviously the release cycle of lire is quite a long one. Therefore I just added a cronjob for a nightly build on one of our institute’s servers. The current SVN version of Lire will be downloaded, compiled, packaged and put online at 0:01 am CET everyday, 7 days a week. While there won’t be too much change on an everyday scale, you still can obtain a freshly compiled lire.jar for use in your project.

You’ll find the link in the right column of the page or at the end of this post. Please let me know if there are any errors etc.

Links

• lire.zip

Apache Commons Sanselan – Image and Metadata I/O

Apache Commons has a nice sub project called Sanselan. It’s a pure Java image library for reading and writing images from and to PNG, PSD (partially), GIF, BMP, ICO, TGA, JPEG and TIFF. It also supports EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata formats, read for all, write for some. Examples for reading and writing images, EXIF, guessing image formats etc. are provided in the source package. Currently Sanselan is available in version 0.9.7 and the release date of this version seems to be in 2009. I’m not sure if this counts as abandoned project, but it definitely doesn’t count as alive

Face Detection in Java

Face detection is basically a common tasks in image retrieval and management. However, finding a stable, well maintained and free-to-use Java library for face detection may prove hard. The OpenIMAJ project contains a common approach and yields rather fine results. However, the packaged version of all the JARs used in OpenIMAJ is quite bunch of classes making up a 30 MB jar file.

For those of you just interested in face detection I compiled and packaged the classes needed for this tasks in a ~5MB file. Finding the faces then with this library is actually a 3 lines of code task:

All the imports needed along with their dependencies are packaged in the facedetect-openimaj.jar file (see archive below).

Files

• FaceDetect-java.zip – ZIP, 5.4M – contains the library and the sample source.

Extracting SURF features – convenience command line utility for Windows

Sometimes you just need a small command line utility to extract some local feature from an image … and you have no time to set up and compile OpenCV right this time. Here’s the solution: I did the task (actually for my students and for me, but still you might use it .

The utility is absolutely basic stuff. Just start “extractSurf.exe” on Windows 7, give it an image as first parameter and it will spit out the surf feature descriptors (on stdout) headed by the x and y coordinates and the response value. Source – of course – is also provided … but it’s not magic. It’s all about the convenience of the binary.

Links to the OpenCV wiki on how to compile the stuff are provided in a small README in the source archive.

Links

• extractSurf-bin.7z - (7Z archive, Win7 32 bit binary, 1.5M)
• extractSurf-src.7z - (7Z archive, C++ code and CMake file, 1.2K)

LireDemo 0.9.1 released

LireDemo 0.9.1 was released earlier today. Changes include several bug fixes, whereas the most critical was the one that prevented the indexing process from indexing a whole directory. Also the an SVN version of Lire has been compiled and added.

Links:

• Download LireDemo 0.9.1

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.

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.

How to get a lot of photos …

I’m currently testing a new implementation of an approximate search index for content based image retrieval. Especially the performance tests have become interesting as I didn’t have access to a real big data size. So what to do?

Actually I programmed a lot of spiders and grabbers before, so I knew that there is a lot of data available on Flickr But I was still searching for an easy way. Now here is my approach (using of course bash):

wget -q -O - http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?format=atom | grep -o .............static.*m.jpg | wget -i -

Why should this work?

• The first wget command gets a list of recent photos as atom feed.
• The grep command gets out all the medium sized (suffix “m.jpeg”) pictures
• The lot of dots and the static are just a nice trick to get the right ones, the real image content.
• Finally the second wget downloads the images from the server.

Issuing this command one should get ~ 25 photos in one go. Using a bash loop or a cronjob you can get of course a lot more in an unattended way

CBIR for Facebook: img(Finder)

Recently Savvas Chatzichristofis released a Facebook app based on his tool img(Rummager) to retrieve the photos of Facebook contacts based on image content. The tool – called img(Finder) – allows to connect to a Facebook account and creates an index based on the CEDD and FCTH image features. img(Finder) indexes the images of all Facebook friends. Querying the index is done by sketch (painting tool is included) or by sample image. Best of all: The tool is open source

Links

• Download and try