Showing papers by "Thomas Sikora published in 2002"

Introduction to MPEG-7: Multimedia Content Description Interface

Abstract: From the Publisher: The MPEG standards are an evolving set of standards for video and audio compression. MPEG 7 technology covers the most recent developments in multimedia search and retreival, designed to standardise the description of multimedia content supporting a wide range of applications including DVD, CD and HDTV. Multimedia content description, search and retrieval is a rapidly expanding research area due to the increasing amount of audiovisual (AV) data available. The wealth of practical applications available and currently under development (for example, large scale multimedia search engines and AV broadcast servers) has lead to the development of processing tools to create the description of AV material or to support the identification or retrieval of AV documents. Written by experts in the field, this book has been designed as a unique tutorial in the new MPEG 7 standard covering content creation, content distribution and content consumption. At present there are no books documenting the available technologies in such a comprehensive way. Presents a comprehensive overview of the principles and concepts involved in the complete range of Audio Visual material indexing, metadata description, information retrieval and browsingDetails the major processing tools used for indexing and retrieval of images and video sequencesIndividual chapters, written by experts who have contributed to the development of MPEG 7, provide clear explanations of the underlying tools and technologies contributing to the standardDemostration software offering step-by-step guidance to the multi-media system components and eXperimentation model (XM) MPEG reference softwareCoincides with the release of the ISO standard in late 2001. A valuable reference resource for practising electronic and communications engineers designing and implementing MPEG 7 compliant systems, as well as for researchers and students working with multimedia database technology.

Media semantics: who needs it and why?

Abstract: Introduction As pointed out in the keynote address at the 2001 ACM Multimedia Conference [3], the current major goal of multimedia research is directed towards provisioning information for pervasive access and use. To achieve this, what will become important are technologies that help sift useful nuggets of information from torrents of media data, which can be turned into valuable knowledge just in time and need, and tools that help provide access to these nuggets in anytime anywhere any device mode to everyone ranging from enterprise customers to independent consumers. Further we need to treat various media on an equal basis in environments that provide multimedia-based interactions, where they ultimately add value to users, whatever the nature of the interactions may be and whatever the preferred mode of media access may be. Thus, there is a fundamental need to investigate the means to elucidate, sublimate, or rationalize information and knowledge from media data. However, current user expectations are far from being met owing to generic low-level content metadata available from automated processing that deal only with representing perceived content, and not the semantics of it.

Hierarchical image database browsing environment with embedded relevance feedback

Abstract: We address the user-navigation through large volumes of image data. A tree structured K-means clustering is introduced which will hierarchically group images into similar groups. Providing the nodes of the different levels with representative image samples leads to different "image maps" similar to street maps with various resolutions of details. The user can zoom into various cluster levels to obtain more or less detail if required. Further a new query refinement method is introduced. The retrieval process is controlled by learning from positive examples from the user, often called the relevance feedback of the user. The combination of the relevance feedback and the hierarchical structure together with a three-dimensional visualization of the "image maps" leads to an intuitive browsing environment. The results obtained verify the attractiveness of the approach for navigation and retrieval applications.

Hierarchical image database browsing environment with embedded relevance feedback and three-dimensional visualization

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a growing interest in developing effective methods for searching large image databases based on image content. A commonly used method is search-by-query, that is often not satisfactory. Often it is difficult to find or produce good query images or repetitive queries tend to become trapped among a small group of undesirable images. To overcome these problems the user is to be provided with easy and intuitive access to information in image databases. In this paper we present a new browsing environment, which uses the metaphor of maps. Like street maps with different scales, from a world map to a city map, the image space is represented through

Relevance feedback as distribution generation

Abstract: Multimedia database interfaces should be designed to be very user-adaptive, since there is no generally applicable model of user's search behavior or of his search intention. First, the challenging task for the interface is to present the most representative objects in an appealing and concise manner. Second, the interface has to identify the user's search intention from very few positive feedbacks. In particular for the latter there exist a lot of Relevance Feedback imple-mentations. While most of them are considered as more or less heuristically proved parameter adjustment procedures, we treat Relevance Feedback as direct probability density estimation. Our density is defined as the