The paper A Comparison of Color Features for Visual Concept Classification by Koen van de Sande, Theo Gevers, and Cees Snoek is available online now. The paper improves upon the CVPR 2008 paper below by considering also the points at which color features are extracted. Hence, different point sampling strategies based on Harris-Laplace salient points, dense sampling and the spatial pyramid are studied in concert with color features.
The paper Evaluation of Color Descriptors for Object and Scene Recognition by Koen van de Sande, Theo Gevers, and Cees Snoek is available online now. Image category recognition is important to access visual information on the level of objects and scene types. So far, intensity-based descriptors have been widely used. To increase illumination invariance and discriminative power, color descriptors have been proposed only recently. As many descriptors exist, a structured overview of color invariant descriptors in the context of image category recognition is required. Therefore, this paper studies the invariance properties and the distinctiveness of color descriptors in a structured way. The invariance properties of color descriptors are shown analytically using a taxonomy based on invariance properties with respect to photometric transformations. The distinctiveness of color descriptors is assessed experimentally using two benchmarks from the image domain and the video domain. From the theoretical and experimental results, it can be derived that invariance to light intensity changes and light color changes affects category recognition. The results reveal further that, for light intensity changes, the usefulness of invariance is category-specific.
During the past two weeks I spent some pleasant time in Germany for a Dagstuhl meeting, the ACM Multimedia PC meeting, and the ICME conference. My personal highlight of all events was the Dagstuhl meeting on Contextual and Social Media Understanding and Usage. This was a very interesting experience. The Dagstuhl concept works as follows: you lock a bunch of people that work on a similar research topic in a castle-like venue in the middle of nowhere. You make sure that they are fed at regular intervals during the day, you group them based on specific interests, and what will happen is that they start to think and talk about novel research ideas. I ended up in a group with Alex Hauptmann, Gareth Jones, and Stéphane Marchand-Maillet. We discussed the possibility of opening a huge central repository for multimedia data, features, software, and experimental results to boost research in contextual and social media understanding. I hope this idea will generate some activity the coming months. Apart from discussing the social aspects of multimedia research, the Dagstuhl meeting was also a very engaging social activity, I especially liked the discussions in the wine cellar :) I owe a big thanks to the organizers of the workshop: Susanne Boll, Mohan Kankanhalli, Gopal Pingali, and Svetha Venkatesh, for inviting me, and of course to the fellow participants (see group photo) for the great atmosphere. I hope to come back to this place at some later point in time.
Together with Alex Hauptmann and Jianmin Li I am organizing a workshop at ACM Multimedia 2008 on Robust Multimedia Learning in Broad Domains. The focus of the workshop is on the unique opportunities, challenges, and solutions for robust multimedia learning across different domains. Media-sharing sites like Flickr YouTube, and Last.fm have brought huge amounts of multimedia resources, reflecting all aspects of social life, with open access to anyone. Such explosions of multimedia data and associated tags provided by amateur-consumers, bring new opportunities for researchers to deepen our already acquired understanding, which, so far, has been restricted to specific domains including sport video, news video and natural images. The proposed workshop strives to broaden our understanding in this emerging area, with an ultimate aim to make unstructured multimedia data from broad domains accessible, reusable, searchable, and manageable. We welcome submissions on this exciting topic, please see the CfP for further details.
The International MultiMedia Modeling Conference is a leading international conference for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all MMM related areas. The 2009 conference, hosted by Institut EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis, France, calls for original high-quality papers in, several areas related to multimedia modeling technologies and applications.
Papers should be no more than 10-12 pages in length, conforming to the formatting instructions of Springer Verlag, LNCS series www.springer.com/lncs. Papers will be judged by an international program committee based on their originality, significance, correctness and clarity. All papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format at MMM2009 paper submission website: http://mmm2009.eurecom.fr no later than July 6, 2008.
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.
A recent study reveals a worldwide downtrend in visits to national parks. The authors show that typical decline started between 1981 and 1991, and that this lack of interest is potentially hurting current conservation efforts. According to the authors a possible cause is what they call videophilia:
“The new human tendency to focus on sedentary activities involving electronic media.”
So in effect, research aiming for better video search methodology is hurting biodiversity conservation. Pfff.
The Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) is organizing a multimedia search competition, check their website at http://www.thestarchallenge.sg/. As of yet the competition details are a bit vague, they talk about voice and video tasks, but the prize money sure is interesting ;)
The new year is already boosting a lot of activity: I just submitted an exciting grant proposal, got invited for the technical program committee of the 2008 ACM Multimedia Conference, and I was also invited to attend the Dagstuhl Seminair on Contextual and Social Media Understanding and Usage in Germany. This topic certainly has my attention and will no doubt generate a lot of interesting research the coming years.
