SemanticMetadata.net

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.

Java Multimedia: FOBS, the FFMPEG JMF Implementation

Have you ever used JMF? Well many people have tried and if they didn’t need it that hard they stop trying soon. One main problem is in my opinion that you have to install the whole thing on your system (libraries outside Java are needed) to get reasonable performance, but you won’t get a lot of codecs. So DivX, MP4, AVC and others are not supported out of the box.

Recently I found two JMF implementation based on FFMPEG, whereas one of them had a really impressive feature: It just worked and did it well. Basically you get a pure Java JMF, but every codec that is not supported by the pure Java JMF, is handled by an FFMPEG shared library. This works out fine for Windows and is also supported for Linux (Ubuntu) and Mac.

If you ever wanted to program some multimedia features in Java: Give Omnividea FOBS a try. Best of all: It’s open source! The screenshot above shows a screenshot while playing the Spiderman game trailer (DivX codec & container, HD).

Lire 0.5.2 Released: Auto Color Correlogram

The 0.5.2 release of LIRe brings along a new descriptor, which is kind or “more advanced version of a color histogram”. The  so called color correlogram is based on the probability to find pixels of certain colors in certain neighborhoods. Leaving the theoretical part aside the color correlogram is a new way to retrieve photos with LIRe based on color and color distribution, which might be very interesting for applications heavily depending on colors. Further information on the correlogram might be found at the development Wiki.

Pure Java JPEG Decoders?

As there are always some issues with loading images I recently checked if there is any pure & free2use Java implementation of a JPEG decoder. Well, obviously there isn’t any alternative to Sun’s javax.imageio package. However I found an interesting site summarizing libraries for de- and encoding raster images here.

As for my schedule: I plan to write some simple decoder for PPM, just a ppm to BufferedImage converter, which should be threaded to support parallel execution on the new double core systems. Doing the same with JPG would be quite a thing I think

Search Engine Lucene 2.0.0 Released

On Saturday morning Doug Cutting has announced the release of Lucene 2.0.0 on the mailing list: “[...] This is mostly a bugfix release from release 1.9.1. Note however that deprecated 1.x features have now been removed. Any code that compiles against Lucene 1.9.1 without deprecation warnings should work without further changes with any 2.x release. [...]” (Doug Cutting)
To Download Lucene visit the Apache download page. A detailed change log can be found here.

JGoodies Looks 2.0.2 Released

An update to the famous and fine art of JGoodies is available: On May 2nd the Looks library in version 2.0.2 was released. An overview on the changes is given in the change log. The download is available here.

Metadata Extractor Updated to 2.3.1

Today I checked the site of Drew Noakes and found out, that the metadata-extractor, the nice little and handy utility to extract EXIF and IPTC data from JPEG images in Java, has been updated to version 2.3.1. There is only one small bug fix in the class ExifDescriptor.java, rest remains the same (see the change log for more details). You can get it here.

Lucene 1.9.1 Fixes Serious Bug

A single optimization in the BufferedIndexOutput class introduced a new bug in Lucene 1.9 final. With 1.9.1 release this bug is fixed. According to the mailing list Doug Cutting recommends an updgrade for all 1.9 users. A changes file is available, the release can be found on the Apache mirrors.

Lucene 1.9 Released

Doug Cutting announce the final release of Lucene 1.9. As already reported the new version brings a lot of new features, better performance and changes. The API has been re-designed in parts, old API relicts have been deprecated. You will find Lucene 1.9 at the Apache Download Mirrors.

Lucene 1.9 RC1 Released

Acdcording to Doug Cutting and his post in the Lucene mailing list, Lucene 1.9 RC1 has been released. As already mentioned a lot of changes like compressed fields and a non blocking IndexReader have been integrated.

Doug Cutting also points out that Lucene 1.9 is the last release being backwards compatible. The 2.0 release will change the API, while the 1.9 only deprecated it. According to other posts in the mailing list, all applications, which do not use deprecated features of the 1.9 release, will be compatible to the upcoming 2.0 release.