Cees Snoek

The BeeldCanon project proposal by Luc Van Gool, Tinne Tuytelaars, Arnold Smeulders and Cees Snoek has been granted a subsidy by the Dutch ICTRegie and Flemish IBBT. The project strives to make Dutch/Flemish image culture, as captured in the video archives of Beeld en Geluid and VRT, accessible to the public. To that end we aim to detect the most important Dutch/Flemish monuments and sceneries, like the Atomium and the Zaanse Schans, and make this (extendible) set of visual detectors available for general-purpose visual retrieval. The scientific challenge lies in realizing a solution which is both highly efficient and highly effective. The project builds on KU Leuven’s expertise in invariant visual representations and object recognition, and the expertise of the University of Amsterdam in large-scale video analysis and interactive retrieval. Prospective PhD students who are interested in the topic are welcome to contact me for more details.

VideOlympics: Real-Time Evaluation of Multimedia Retrieval Systems by Cees Snoek, Marcel Worring, Ork de Rooij, Koen van de Sande, Rong Yan, and Alex Hauptmann has now been published in IEEE MultiMedia. Demo sessions of multimedia retrieval systems are ideal venues to disseminate scientific results. Existing demo sessions, however, fail to engage the audience fully. We argue that real-time evaluation of several multimedia retrieval systems in a single showcase increases impact. We highlight the requirements for such a focused effort and share our experience in organizing the VideOlympics: a real-time evaluation showcase of present day video search engines. We produced a video trailer of the event (in collaboration with Fabchannel), which gives a multimedia impression of the first VideOlympics as recorded on July 10, 2007 at Beeld en Geluid, the Dutch national broadcast archive.

We organize another VideOlympics at CIVR 2008.