SemanticMetadata.net

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

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