SemanticMetadata.net

Lire accepted for the Open Source Contest @ ACM MM

Although its quite some time ago that I got the acceptance mail I forgot to blog the good news: Lire (Lucene Image Retrieval) has been acccepted to be presented at the ACM Multimedia within the Open Source Contest track. As it is a contest I assume we have chances to win something?

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.

WIAMIS 2008 starts today …

The 9th International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services (WIAMIS) takes place for the next three days in Klagenfurt, Austria. As we (the Multimedia Metadata Community) organized a special session there we will gather on Thursday latest and discuss current and upcoming research topics.

While I still have some things to prepare for tomorrow I will visit Horst Bischof’s keynote talk on “Robust Person Detection for Surveillance using Online Learning” and I hope I will find some time to blog about the conference.

Related Links

• WIAMIS Program

Deadline Extension: I-Media Special Session on Multimedia Metadata

The paper submission deadline has been extended to April 28, 2008.

Original CfP: 

Studies show that sales of digital capture devices like video camera, digital photo cameras, or mobile phones with digital cameras are still rising. Therefore it can be expected that the number of created digital multimedia content will rise dramatically in future. Multimedia metadata is currently the only way to cope with problems like semantics based retrieval or organization of content and provides means to specify adaptation and delivery constraints and rules. Within this special session the importance of metadata for media technologies is discussed. We encourage the submission of high quality scientific work as well as application papers. Topics include but are not limited to:

• Multimedia technologies and metadata in the social web
• Multimedia semantics
• Annotation of multimedia content
• Metadata in pervasive multimedia computing
• Metadata for new media
• Studies and surveys in context of multimedia metadata and new media

We encourage the submission of high quality scientific work as well as application papers.

More Information …

My new EEE PC

With some luck I grabbed an Asus EEE PC - a white one, the last in stock - at the Saturn market on Wednesday. As I always wanted to own a subnotebook my expectations were quite high, but I have to say: I’m impressed! The EEE comes with a whole lot of software (OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Kontact, Konqueror, … even Java JRE 1.5) and can be customized without end. I installed several games, the VLC media player and the Opera browser, which works really fine with the page zoom feature.

On the photo you can see the EEE along with my PSP. This shows how small this thing is. Also the weight is impressive, but best of all: It can decode MPEG-2 (DVB transport streams) and H.264 without dropping a lot of frames. That’s really cool as the CPU runs only at ~ 600 MHz.

While my colleagues are already queuing to do some multimedia tests I’m looking forward to testing the Java capabilities of this device. Full 1.5 mobile java runtime … sounds great to me

CfP: I-Media Special Session on Multimedia Metadata

I’m happy to announce that there will be a special session of the Multimedia Metadata Community at the TRIPLE-I / I-Media conference in Graz in September.

CfP: I-Media Special Session on Multimedia Metadata

Studies show that sales of digital capture devices like video camera, digital photo cameras, or mobile phones with digital cameras are still rising. Therefore it can be expected that the number of created digital multimedia content will rise dramatically in future. Multimedia metadata is currently the only way to cope with problems like semantics based retrieval or organization of content and provides means to specify adaptation and delivery constraints and rules. Within this special session the importance of metadata for media technologies is discussed. We encourage the submission of high quality scientific work as well as application papers. Topics include but are not limited to:

• Multimedia technologies and metadata in the social web
• Multimedia semantics
• Annotation of multimedia content
• Metadata in pervasive multimedia computing
• Metadata for new media
• Studies and surveys in context of multimedia metadata and new media

We encourage the submission of high quality scientific work as well as application papers.

Organization

The special session is organized by the Multimedia Metadata Community which has already organized a series of 8 successful workshops in the past taking place in Aachen, Berlin, Graz and Klagenfurt. The Multimedia Metadata Community aims to extend the active and successful community and network with new members.

Submission

Submissions for the special session are handled via the submission system of the TRIPLE-I/I-Media and are reviewed by the TRIPLE-I/I-Media program committee.

14 April 2008: Submission of the full papers (4-8 pages)
31 May 2008: Notification of acceptance
30 June 2008: Camera ready version (8 pages)
3-5 September 2008: TRIPLE-I Conference

Special Session Chairs

• Michael Granitzer, Know-Center Graz
• Mathias Lux, ITEC / Klagenfurt University

Contact: mlux <at> itec <dot> uni-klu.ac.at

Related Links

• Special Session Homepage

H.264 compression test published

Today I found a compression test on different H.264 (and one MPEG-4 ASP) encoders. They tested the compression to visual quality ratio and found out that the MainConcept encoder (German company, recently acquired by DivX) performs best. The difference to the next rank however is marginal and x264 is second. Deciding based on a compression to price ratio will therefore be very easy

Related Links:

• Compression test
• MainConcept
• x264  (on Wikipedia)

img(Anaktisi) Image Search Engine

Since Blobworld was down I was hoping for a new online CBIR system to show in lectures. Last week I received word about the img(Anaktisi) image search engine from Savvas Chatzichristofis. This search engine is based on 2 new content based descriptors that combine color and edge features. The results look promising!

There is also an offline sketch based retrieval system being developed. A screencast can be found on YouTube.

Related Links

• img(Anaktisi) online image search
• img(Paint.Anaktisis) offline sketch based cbir screencast (via YouTube)
• Savvas’ blog
  

CfP: TRIPLE-I Conference

From the web page: The TRIPLE-I Conference series is a joint venture of the conferences I-KNOW, I-MEDIA and I-SEMANTICS. TRIPLE-I reflects the increasing importance and convergence of knowledge management, new media technologies and semantic systems. This unique concept aims at bridging the gaps between the various communities and their technology fields.

Last years  TRIPLE-I  was a great success, so I’m looking forward to this event. It’s scheduled 3-5 September in Graz. Austria. Full paper submission deadline is April, 14th.

Presenting MPEG-4 AVC / H.264 Videos on the Web with Flash 9

While Adobe Flash (former Macromedia Flash) managed to take the top position of WWW based tools for watching video it was stuck with these flv video files for a long time. With version 9 now H.264 (or AVC as it is called in context of MPEG-4) encoded videos are supported along with popular container formats like mp4, mov or 3gp. Or in short words: Flash can now play iPod and PSP videos.

Now for the meat: How to get your AVC files into a web page?

• Encode your video file. Use MediaCoder or any other tool to create an iPod or PSP compatible video. Take care that you select AVC for your target codec. It’s called MPEG-4 AVC in the PSP as well as in the iPod extension of Mediacoder for example (see screenshot).
• Download the FLV Mediaplayer and unzip it somewhere.
• Create a website where your video should be played and move the FLV Mediaplayer along with associated files and the video in a subdirectory of the page’s directory.
• Use the setup wizard to create the code for embedding your player.
  • Select “Mediaplayer with a single FLV”
  • Source: [relative subdirectory]/mediaplayer.flv
  • Fill in width & height (you chose it in your encoding tool)
  • Put down the path to the .mp4 file
• Copy the resulting code to your web page and test it in a browser

That’s the easiest way to present a video. More sophisticated methods include streaming or configuring the player with JavaScript. You can also add playlists, show a logo and jump to timepoints.

Related Links

•  Here is also a tutorial on how to embed the mediaplayer on your page