SemanticMetadata.net » Retrieval

Lire 0.7 Released

Mathias Lux — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 08:27:15 +0000

Lire 0.7 is a major release fixing a lot of bugs and introducing several new features including new descriptor, a simplified way to use descriptors by introducing new generic searchers and indexers as well as an generalized interface for image descriptors. There are also several improvements in indexing and search speed (especially in autocolorcorrelogram). Furthermore retrieval performance was optimized based on the Wang 1000 data set. If you use Lire 0.7 to update an existing version, please make sure that your indices are created newly from scratch. All new features have also found their way into LireDemo, which now also supports multi-threaded indexing.
Thanks for comments, code and general comments go again to Savvas Chatzichristofis, Rodrigo Carvalho Rezende, Marko Keuschnig, Christian Penz, Oge Marques, Anna-Maria Pasterk and Christoph Kofler.

Links:

CBIR for Facebook: img(Finder)

Mathias Lux — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 09:12:46 +0000

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

img(Anaktisi) Image Search Engine

Mathias Lux — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:00:19 +0000

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

Just some words on the TIR 07 (Workshop Report)

Mathias Lux — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 15:21:39 +0000

Last Monday I’ve been at the Text Information Retrieval workshop, taking place in the Regensburg University in context of the DEXA conference. Benn Stein – as always – did a very good job on organizing the workshop. There were 11 papers accepted and the overall quality was high. All paper can be found online here.

Personally I’d recommend the following if you want to take a look at the highlights of the workshop:

Author Identification Using Imbalanced and Limited Training Texts – E. Stamatatos presents a new distance function for author identification. He gave a very good overview on this topic in his talk.
An MDA Approach to Implement Personal IR Tools – Meyer zu Eissen and B. Stein show their architecture for modular search engines, which aims to formalize and simplify the construction of search engines and retrieval applications through the use of UML.

Furthermore I also presented a paper there: Aspects of Broad Folksonomies, which I’ve done together in constant collaboration with Michael Granitzer and Roman Kern. The slides are also online here.

TIR 07: Call for Participation

Mathias Lux — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 21:00:25 +0000

On 3rd September the Workshop on Text Information Retrieval (TIR 07) takes place in Regensburg, Germany. I’ll be there presenting our work (Michael Granitzer, Roman Kern and me) on folksonomy characteristics: Aspects of Broad Folksonomies (download pdf). Main contribution of the paper is that tag similarity in the del.icio.us folksonomy follows a power law in many cases. This means that many tags have only few highly related tags, while the similarity to other tags is rather low.

You can find the whole program as well as the contributions (as pdf) on the TIR07 website.

SIGIR Forum June 2007

Mathias Lux — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 07:00:13 +0000

In the last issue of the SIGIR Forum I found a very interesting in my opinion is the article of Massimo Melucci: On Rank Correlation in Information Retrieval Evaluation. I really like this paper. Massimo Melucci gives a lot of basic references on the use of rank correlation in retrieval evaluation. However his publication has a very practical (in contrast to mathematical & theoretical) essence and remains restricted to the comparison of values generated by experts or algorithms. The complicated task of integrating the target user (not an retrieval expert assessing the results) is not discussed in length.

Especially the last thing was part of the work in my PhD. One can find some further information in the publication Empirical Studies in Multimedia Retrieval Evaluation available here.

WWW 2006 Tagging Workshop Proceedings [Update]

Mathias Lux — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 09:37:19 +0000

As Frank Smadja pointed out here (see comment) the original proceedings of the tagging workshop @ WWW 2006 site is down. Luckily the files are not lost, but mirrored here:

WWW 2006 Tagging Workshop Online Proceedings

LIRe 0.5.4 Released

Mathias Lux — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:17:52 +0000

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.

Book Review: Google’s Pagerank and Beyond …

Mathias Lux — Thu, 24 May 2007 10:36:30 +0000

As I really like the field of information retrieval, I ordered a new book for our University library: Google’s Pagerank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings (Amy N. Langville & Carl D. Meyer, University Presses of CA). Wondering if this was a good one I took a look inside …

I’ve got to say: I’m impressed! All the main ideas of information retrieval and PageRank (as well as HITS) are described within the first few chapters. The following chapters go into mathematical and technical details: Why and how does this work, why and how can it be used in a distributed environment? My opinion: Two thumbs up!

WWW 2006 Tagging Workshop Proceedings

Mathias Lux — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 10:02:42 +0000

At the WWW 2006 a workshop on the topic tagging took place. There were several papers especially on folksonomies and emergent semantics. ~~The proceedings are available online at: /hosted/taggingws-www2006-files/taggingworkshopschedule.htm~~ The proceedings are hosted here as the original site is no longer available. (Many thanks to Frank Smadja, who provided the files and allowed to mirror them)

Keynote

Tagging : From the personal to the social, Rashmi Sinha

Overview and Enterprise

Position Paper, Tagging, Taxonomy, Flickr, Article, ToRead.
Cameron Marlow, Mor Naaman, danah boyd, Marc Davis; Yahoo! Research and UC Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems.
Fringe Contacts: People-Tagging for the Enterprise.
Stephen Farrell and Tessa Lau IBM Almaden Research Center
Collaborative Tagging and Expertise in the Enterprise
Ajita John, Doree Seligmann, Avaya Labs Research.
Onomi: Social Bookmarking on a Corporate Intranet.
Laurie Damianos, John Griffith, Donna Cuomo; The MITRE Corporation

Mining the TagSpace

“Automated Tag Clustering: Improving search and exploration in the tag space.”
Grigory Begelman, Philipp Keller, Frank Smadja; Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Citrin Informatik GmbH and RawSugar.
“Towards the Semantic Web: Collaborative Tag Suggestions.”
Zhichen Xu, Yun Fu, Jianchang Mao, and Difu Su; Yahoo! Inc.
“Integrating Collaborative Tagging and Emergent Semantics for Image Retrieval.”
Melanie Aurnhammer, Luc Steels, Peter Hanappe; Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris and University of Brussels (VUB).
“Inducing Ontology from Flickr Tags.”
Patrick Schmitz University of California, Berkeley and Yahoo! Research, Berkeley.

Applications

Foragr: Collaboratively Tagged Photographs and Social Information Visualization
Brian M. Dennis, EECS Department and New Media Program Northwestern University
Investigating social tagging and folksonomy in art museums with steve.museum
Jennifer Trant, Bruce Wyman; Archives & Museum Informatics, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, Denver Art Museum with the participants in the steve.museum project.
Structured vs. unstructured tagging ï¿½ A case study
Judit Bar-Ilan, Snunith Shoham, Asher Idan, Yitzchak Miller and Aviv Shachak; Department of Information Science, Bar-Ilan University Ramat-Gan, Israel.
Tagging the physical world
Yoelle S. Maarek, Natalia Marmasse, Yaakov Navon, Vova Soroka, Google and IBM Haifa Research Lab

Demos

Tressel: Semantic markup of RSS feeds
Brian McLernon Nicholas Kushmerick, School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Ireland
Implicit Tagging using Donated Bookmarks
Ben Markines, Lubomira Stoilova, and Filippo Menczer; Department of Computer Science, School of Informatics, Indiana University
Tag-Based Navigation for Peer-to-Peer Wikipedia; Jenneke Fokker, Johan Pouwelse and Wray Buntine; Departments of Industrial Design and Computer Sciences Delft University of Technology The Netherlands and Department of Computer Science, Helsinki Institute of Information Technology