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Social Media, Tagging and Images Semantics

Mathias Lux — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 10:19:29 +0000

Recently there was quite a buzz around the whole social media topic. Many researchers saw indications that the willingness or people to share and annotate content might lead to new ways of indexing, searching and consuming multimedia. The biggest problems with the buzz is … that it’s BIG Many research groups produced even more papers and with the rising number of papers the scientific impact got smaller and smaller. However Neela Sawant, Jia Li and James Z. Wang took a close look at more than 200 papers and provide a survey on part of the topic with the journal article “Automatic image semantic interpretation using social action and tagging data” in the Multimedia Tools and Applications journal.

Links

Visual Attention in Lire

Mathias Lux — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:44:19 +0000

While doing my preparations for my multimedia information systems lecture I finally came around to implement the visual attention model of Stentiford myself. I just check in the sources (SVN). The algorithm gives actually really nice results compared to its actual simplicity (implementationwise). You can see an example in the following figure. On the left hand side there is the original image and on the right hand side a visualization of the attention map. The light areas (especially the white ones) are deemed centers of attention. Sky and sand are so to say just random noise (there is a lot of “random” in this approach).

Links

F. W. M. Stentiford, “An estimator for visual attention through competitive novelty with application to image compression,” Proc. Picture Coding Symposium, pp 101-104, Seoul, 24-27 April, 2001.

Lire 0.8 released

Mathias Lux — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:15:33 +0000

I just released LIRe v0.8. LIRe – Lucene Image Retrieval – is a Java library for easy content based image retrieval. Based on Lucene it doesn’t need a database and works reliable and rather fast. Major change in this version is the support of Lucene 3.0.1, which has a changed API and better performance on some OS. A critical bug was fixed in the Tamura feature implementation. It now definitely performs better Hidden in the depths of the code there is an implementation of the approximate fast indexing approach of G. Amato. It copes with the problem of linear search and provides a method for fast approximate retrieval for huge repositories (millions?). Unfortunately I haven’t tested with millions, just with tens thousands, which proves that it works, but it doesn’t show how fast.

Links

Download Lire & Lire Demo

Lire v0.8 is on its way … just some more tests

Mathias Lux — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:32:26 +0000

I just checked in my latest code for LIRe and it looks like it’s nearly v0.8 release ready. Major changes include the use of Lucene 3.0.1, some bug fixes on descritors, several new test files (including one that shows how to do an LSA with image features) and of course an updated demo application. While everything needs a bit more testing as well as an documentation update, I can offer a pre-compiled demo here. All changed and added sources can be found in the SVN.

Links

SVN URL and description
LireDemo v 0.8 (preview, bin + src)

Best Paper Award

Mathias Lux — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:37:14 +0000

“SPCD – SPATIAL COLOR DISTRIBUTION DESCRIPTOR – A Fuzzy Rule based Composite Descriptor Appropriate for Hand Drawn Color Sketches Retrieval” received the best paper award at the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART), Valencia-Spain, January 22-24, 2010.

Congratulations to Savvas!

Links

Original post

Lire: Submission to the ACM Multimedia Open Source Contest 2008

Mathias Lux — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:00:27 +0000

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 development: a big next step ..

Mathias Lux — Thu, 29 May 2008 08:12:09 +0000

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.

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