SemanticMetadata.net

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

Visual VM is Part of Java 1.6 Update 7

Java 1.6 u7 was released recently by Sun. While not bringing major changes it brought along some bug fixes and solved some security issues. However there is one main addition: The VisualVM. This is a really great developer tool: It connects to running VMs and shows “some statistics” about them. Besides memory usage and threads information it also allows to do some basic profiling. In my opinion Sun did a good job on including VisualVM in the package! Not that this thing is build on the NetBeans Platform

Links:

• Java 1.6 u7 release notes

Finding duplicate code …

I recently found myself in a scenario, where I tried to figure out how implementation clusters have been implicitly created within a group of students. All of them were given a task (with 4 sub tasks) for a whole semester. Everyone was meant to do the task alone, but collaboration was allowed. However I needed to know who helped whom and - of course - who helped whom with source code.

A colleague had a similar problem and he pointed me to PMD CPD (= PMD Copy & Paste Detector) . This tool works lightning fast and has a GUI Also its open source -> respect!

Links:

• http://pmd.sourceforge.net/cpd.html

Compiler Construction & Lord of the Rings

Recently I had an idea on compilers and code generation. Generating assembler code (I’m talking about MIPS code) and with it labels I thought: Why not using cool names for labels? Instead of

LB_WH002_001G:
beq $a1, $v1,  LB_WH002_002G
add $a1, $a1, $v1
j  LB_WH002_001G
LB_WH002_002G:
...

One could be more creative and use for instance Names from Lord of the Rings like:

THE_SHIRE:
beq $a1, $v1,  MORDOR
add $a1, $a1, $v1
j  THE_SHIRE
MORDOR:
...

While this definitely does not increase readability of assembler code I still think it doesn’t lessen it much. Instead it introduces “geekiness” to assembler

For those who are not creative themselves and need a lot of labels I recommend the numerous fanrtasy fantasy name generators available on the internet like this, this or this one.

Lire: Submission to the ACM Multimedia Open Source Contest 2008

I recently submitted Lire and LireDemo to the ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition 2008. As I’d really like to go there I hope it will judged as relevant contribution and a demo at the ACM Multimedia is requested. Note that I’ve integrated a new feature in LireDemo for the ACM Multimedia submission: Now its easier to test Lire by just indexing random photos from Flickr. By just hitting the “Index” button without giving a directory of images the download will start automatically.

Links:

• Submission files (~800 kB)

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.

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.

NetBeans 6.1 Released

The new NetBeans IDE 6.1 has been released 2 days ago. Changes are more incremental than fundamental, but it features now support for JavaScript and code completion for JavaDoc. Furthermore support for MySQL has been added. Release notes can be found here.

Image Mosaics with Ajax

Did you ever think image mosaics in a web application are something that can only be rendered on server side? Well a very interesting post gives an example for the generation of image mosaics with JavaScript and Ajax. The authors employs a JavaScript binary file reader and uses the raw values from greyscale BMPs to find the mosaic. The approach for mosaic creation is simply yet effective: The overall luminance of an image is taken as “single value descriptor” and single pixels are substituted by very small BMPs.

Related Links:

• Ajax mosaic builder - The blog entry describing the Ajax way of mosaic creation
• Lire Demo - The offline way for image mosaic creation (also featuring colored images and formats different from BMP)