SemanticMetadata.net » Development

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)

GDC Europe 09: Art & Production Management

Mathias Lux — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:00:16 +0000

First presentation in the morning I listened to was the one from Stefan Baier and Rainer Banninga, both co-founders of Streamline Studios. They talked about how art, coding and production are interconnected and what is there approach to manage all this.

They state that it is crucial to communicate interdisciplinary and to know people personally (meet them at least one time). For the art side they point out how crucial it is to stay within limits (memory, hardware, etc.) and to allow streaming of content. Another point they make is that you have to buy in the right tools or that you afford having an in-house dev team for tools you need (e.g. a race track editor for a racing game). An interesting artist team streamline studios has is the SWAT team. That’s 2-3 people just taking care of unexpectedthings in projects like cleaning up, changing details, removing glitches, etc. Rainer Banninga stated they had no crunch time for the last 18 month, so the approach looks good Surprisingly the Stefan and Rainer elobarate the need of standardized metadata meaning keyords. That’s a good sign that industry doesn’t really know about whats going on in standardization and acadmia or the other way round that standardization and academia are not working on solutions that can be applied in industry.

NetBeans Community Approves NetBeans 6.7 for Prime Time Release

Mathias Lux — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:49:32 +0000

The NetBeans community acceptance survey has voted for thhe last NetBeans 6.7 RC to be stable enough to be shipped. While this sounds great there is one minor details I consider critical for the significance of the survey: Only 182 people responded. (re-engineneered from 144 people being 79%). If we go with common numbers in empirical research ~5 % of the population take part in survey like these and therefore I conclude that the size of the NetBeans community is around 3.600 people.

NetBeans is actually having quite a a hard time with Eclipse pressing from open source and Idea pressing from commercial alternatives. Also the free IDEs of Microsoft’s .NET family affect the scene. However, I still think that if NetBeans manages to advance from the “I can do all” principle to a small and lean application development environment featuring a fast and intelligent editor and a WYSIWYG gui builder there is definitely a chance.

Links

Announcement.

Visual VM is Part of Java 1.6 Update 7

Mathias Lux — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:59:41 +0000

Java 1.6 u7 was released recently by Sun. While not bringing major changes it brought along some bug fixes and solved some security issues. However there is one main addition: The VisualVM. This is a really great developer tool: It connects to running VMs and shows “some statistics” about them. Besides memory usage and threads information it also allows to do some basic profiling. In my opinion Sun did a good job on including VisualVM in the package! Not that this thing is build on the NetBeans Platform

Links:

Java 1.6 u7 release notes

Less than 20% of Flickr images tagged …

Mathias Lux — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:42:59 +0000

While writing a scientific paper on tag recommendation I checked – just out of curiosity – the share of images tagged by their uploaders on Flickr. I found out that 4 out of five images are untagged and that less than 15% of images have 2 or more tags.

My method and detailed results: In general one would need a random sample for such an investigation, but a truly random sample is hard to obtain without access to the data base. Therefore I just grabbed 20,004 images from the RSS feed for recent uploads and counted the number of tagged images. Easy enough I also computed the confidence interval:

In my sample 3,650 images were tagged with at least one tag, that makes p1=18.25%

With alpha=0.99 p1 is in [16.84, 19.66].
That leaves more than 4 out of 5 images untagged.

Also in my sample 2,628 images were tagged with at least two tags, that makes p2=13,14%

With alpha=0.99 p2 is in [11.9, 14.37].
That means that less than 15% of the images images have more than one tag.

Finding duplicate code …

Mathias Lux — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:58:05 +0000

I recently found myself in a scenario, where I tried to figure out how implementation clusters have been implicitly created within a group of students. All of them were given a task (with 4 sub tasks) for a whole semester. Everyone was meant to do the task alone, but collaboration was allowed. However I needed to know who helped whom and – of course – who helped whom with source code.

A colleague had a similar problem and he pointed me to PMD CPD (= PMD Copy & Paste Detector) . This tool works lightning fast and has a GUI Also its open source -> respect!

Links:

http://pmd.sourceforge.net/cpd.html

Compiler Construction & Lord of the Rings

Mathias Lux — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:36:02 +0000

Recently I had an idea on compilers and code generation. Generating assembler code (I’m talking about MIPS code) and with it labels I thought: Why not using cool names for labels? Instead of

LB_WH002_001G: beq $a1, $v1, LB_WH002_002G add $a1, $a1, $v1 j LB_WH002_001G LB_WH002_002G: ...

One could be more creative and use for instance Names from Lord of the Rings like:

THE_SHIRE: beq $a1, $v1, MORDOR add $a1, $a1, $v1 j THE_SHIRE MORDOR: ...

While this definitely does not increase readability of assembler code I still think it doesn’t lessen it much. Instead it introduces “geekiness” to assembler

For those who are not creative themselves and need a lot of labels I recommend the numerous ~~fanrtasy~~ fantasy name generators available on the internet like this, this or this one.

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.

Caliph, Emir and Lire development switched to subversion

Mathias Lux — Fri, 23 May 2008 15:04:25 +0000

Today I did something I should have done a long time ago: I switched (within sf.net) from cvs to subversion. Now login, update and commit are much faster and development gets easier. If you are interested you can browse the repository here: http://caliph-emir.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/caliph-emir/. If you want to check out and get the code, then you can find the documentation on sf.net.