SemanticMetadata.net

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

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]
  

Lire development: a big next step ..

While it has been quiet for some time around Lire, recently development has been pushed forward. I switched to SVN for development and integrated simple RGB color histograms as a feature for comparison with the MPEG-7 features. Savvas Chatzichristofis (or on facebook, his image search engine) contributed the CEDD feature, which works great! Marko Keuschnig and Christian Penz contributed implementations for the Gabor texture feature and the Tamura texture features, where the latter is already in the SVN. I also integrated the new features in LireDemo. A new version – already compiled – can be downloaded here: liredemo-svn-2008-05-29-jdk16.tar.bz2 Note that Java 1.6 is required.

Multimedia Book Coming Feb. 2008

Behind the curtains of the Multimedia Metadata Community we prepared a book consisting of 12 contributions in context of multimedia metadata and semantics. It’s already mentioned online. It’s available in Feb. 2008.

Title: Multimedia Semantics – The Role of Metadata
Editors: M. Granitzer, M. Lux & M. Spaniol
Pages: ~260
ISBN: 978-3-540-77472-3

The web page at Springer is here. I’ll blog more about the book as soon as it is published.

NetBeans 6.0 is finally here!

Sun has released NetBeans 6.0 – the final version. Get it here. For all who missed my praise in previous post: Use it! Why use NetBeans?

• It has a really cool GUI Editor.
• The editor doesn’t suck any more (some refactoring, code completion and templates, …).
• It supports many common tools (Ant, SVN, JUnit, ..).
• It’s the alternative to Eclipse.

Small Test of NetBeans 6.0 RC 2 (Windows XP, just the Java SE version)

Installation works fine and fast, start up speed is ok. The start up screen gives enough hints to start with. I like that as it is especially good for people starting with Java and/or NetBeans. I’m really satisfied now with the editor. It works fast enough and the completion hints are fine. Classes and members the editor does not know are created fast enough by hitting <alt>-<enter>.

I found one bug thing though: I created a class Tile with two members: One of the class Rectangle2D.Double and one of the class Point2D.Double. When using the automatic Getter and Setter code generation the return values for the Getter for the point were just Double while the Getter for the rectangle returned java.awt.geom.Rectangle2D.Double. That’s not really an issue, I know, but not the optimal way of programming either. At least I was not satisfied and edited the source afterwards

NetBeans 6.0 RC 1 Released

Final release of the Java IDE NetBeans 6.0 is planned in late 2007. However the release candidate 1 has been released. NetBeans 6.0 offers tons of features for Java SE, EE and ME developers as well as a D’n'D Swing editor, BPEL support, graphical SQL editor, one click webstart release and so on. I’ll try and report soon.

Moved ImageSeams to Google Code

With the v4 version I decided to put up a project at Google Code for the whole thing as I needed Subversion support and some way to handle the downloads. You’ll find all information on the project there.

• Project home: http://code.google.com/p/java-imageseams/
• Project downloads: http://code.google.com/p/java-imageseams/downloads/list
• Source repository: http://code.google.com/p/java-imageseams/source

Co-developers are of course welcome

Content Aware Image Resizing: GPL Implementation

Just for the proof of concept I’ve implemented parts of the Content Aware Image Resizing algorithm (presented by Avidan, S. & Shamir, A.) shown here (covered also on Slashdot, Techcrunch, …) in Java (GPL). Currently image size can only be reduced.

The images on the left show results from the implementation. The source as well as the binaries can be downloaded here:

• Source & Binaries (Java 1.6 needed, ~30k): SeamCarving.tar.bz2SeamCarving.zip
• Windows Executable (Java 1.6 needed, ~200k): SeamCarving-Win-Bin.zip
• The most current implementation can be found here.

I’ve furthermore put up a GUI tool for loading and ‘carving’ images. It allows to mark areas for retaining (red brush) as well as for removal (green brush). The screenshot shows the application with area already colored. Download is here:

• Source & Binaries (Java 1.6 needed, ~65k): ImageCarving-GUI.zip