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

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?

Firefox 3 default page zoom missing …

On my eee PC I really need a browser, which allows zooming the whole page. While using opera a lot I also like Firefox 3 a lot as it runs rather fast and consumes less memory than Firefox 2. However there is one thing, which is really annoying: Firefox 3 does not allow users to set a default zoom level to start with, which is a rather hand feature for my eee PC 701 .

Fortunately a clever developer found the problem and prepared an add-on, which allows default zoom levels and much more: No Squint … thanks go to Jason Tackaberry.

Links:

• No Squint - original home page
• No Squint - at mozilla.org

LIRE v0.6 released: New Image Features

The new release contains three additional features: (i) Tamura texture features, (ii) Color and Edge Directivity Descriptor (CEDD) and (iii) a configurable color histogram implementation. While the last one was integrated for comparison only the other two provide additional improvements, especially the CEDD feature. Furthermore a FastMap implementation was included in the release for optimization of the indexing process in a later release. Also some bugs were fixed in the MPEG-7 EdgeHistogram descriptor provided in the cbir-library jar file and in color-only search. Note that due to the increased number of features the extensive document builder, which extracts all available features, needs significantly more time for extraction than in the last release.

Links:

• Download Lire & LireDemo

Statistics on Caliph, Emir and Lire

Today I created a presentation on Caliph and Emir and I looked up how long these open source projects are now part of my (online & research) life. In July 2004 I put the first open source version of Caliph & Emir online and ~ 6.700 downloads happened from then till now. Furthermore the Java Web Start files of Caliph and Emir were accessed about 1.300 times. Lire was more successful: Going online in 2006 it was ~3.600 times download till now.

Taking a look around I have to say that Caliph is still the only MPEG-7 tool for semantic descriptions. Due to the fact that it is a prototype (with virtually no productive use) i assume that there is currently no need for such a tool. Reported use is focused on MPEG-7 development and research projects. Lire on the other hand has a more active user base: I know several projects where Lire is used. Seems like there actually is a need for an open source Java library for content based image retrieval.

The iBlue 747 GPS Logger

Recently I bought the iBlue 747 GPS Logger after reading the review on Cool Tools. While most GPS devices sold here are based on the SiRF star III chip, the 747 is based on the MTK chipset. This allows the user to fill the internal memory easily before you run out of power instead of the other way round. For more detailed information I found a extensive review on gpspassion.com.

From my point of view the device is good enough. Memory holds up to 70.ooo waypoints and there is enough power for a long hike, walk or bike tour. The software however is somewhat limited. I recommend to use the Java open source software BT747 for downloading the track logs and allows to convert them to Google Earth files, Google Map HTMLs (for sending by email), GPX or NMEA. This tool is rather complicated to use but works fine as soon as you managed to let it do what you want. One will also need the driver, but all instructions are given in the howto of the bt747 software.

What took some time for me to realize was that the internal memory of the iBlue 747 was 16 Mbit, which is 2 MByte. This was quite a shock (as I misread it first), but as already mentioned its enough for ~ 70k track points. The GPS mouse function comes handy when navigating with my mobile phone, which - just to mention - has the same battery type as the gps device One thing that disturbs me somewhat: I’d like to have a device where track logs can be downloaded using plain USB (like from a USB storage device) not serial over USB, which is awfully slow. Also I’d like to have GPS that works inside the house too

Geo tagging of photos also works fine, there are several tools available. I’ve tested the GPS Log Analyzer and GeoSetter, which both work fine. The locr tool seems to produce GPS Exif metadata that can’t be read from Google Picasa. Flickr recognizes the geo tags also, but you have to activate the import of those in your privacy settings.

Google Talk, AIM and ICQ

Google announced lately that their messenger built into the GMail web interface supports AIM. No words of ICQ there, but be assured it works fine As AIM is somewhat related to ICQ (I’ll spare you the details) you can just use your ICQ # and password and it works fine. Meebo won’t like this as half of its functions are now integrated in GMail. Have fun chatting!

Update:  How to use the new feature? Use Settings -> Chat “Sign into a different AIM account” or the “Options” combo box in the chat window (see also screenshot, the AIM icon denotes an AIM contact).

Moved ImageSeams to Google Code

With the v4 version I decided to put up a project at Google Code for the whole thing as I needed Subversion support and some way to handle the downloads. You’ll find all information on the project there.

• Project home: http://code.google.com/p/java-imageseams/
• Project downloads: http://code.google.com/p/java-imageseams/downloads/list
• Source repository: http://code.google.com/p/java-imageseams/source

Co-developers are of course welcome

Content Based Image Resizing (GPL, Java): Update to v4

I’ve just uploaded a maintenance release. Biggest change is that the seam table is now re-used. Therefore computation is somewhat faster. I’ve also cleaned out the code and made more ‘readable’. Fell free to download and comment:

• Java Webstart: ImageSeams
• Download binaries & source v4 (Java Swing GUI App): SeamCarving-v4.zip (66K) or SeamCarving-v4.tar.bz2 (57k)
• Download Windows binary (Java Swing GUI App with Windows launcher, Java 1.6 needed, 243k)

Other tools (stand alone, plugins, etc.) are reviewed for instance here. Seems like there is a “war of seam carving tools” going on. Many of those are closed source, perhaps some people are trying to make money selling old shoes The roadmap for this implementation is clear: If the following two constraints are met development is going on:

• Someone (including me) needs some feature / performance upgrade or finds some bug
• Someone (possibly me) finds some time to implement the feature / performance upgrade

Open Source @ ACM Multimedia 2007

This year there was also an open source software contest at the ACM MM. 4 different projects were selected to be presented in a special session:

• HOP is a framework for generating multimedia web applications easily. They introduce a new model (brokers in between web servers and clients) and a new programming language.
• ADVENE is a video annotation (GTK, VLC & ffmpeg) tool that allows a whole lot of different annotation types and views on metadata and content itself. Unfortunately it doesn’t support MPEG-7.
• GPAC is an open source multimedia framework famous for its support of scene based multimedia content (LASER, MPEG-4, etc.)
• Xface is meant to allow the creation of MPEG-4 based talking heads.

It’s really nice to see that academic effort and EU funding also results in open source projects so other researchers can built on top of other research results!