The Ups and Downs of Image Retrieval

May 28 2007

Last week I gave a joint IAM seminar with Jon Hare, as part of the IAM 2006/2007 seminar series.

The seminar was officially called "Bridging the Semantic Gap in Multimedia Information Retrieval: Top-down and Bottom-up Approaches", although we decided that what we really were talking about was "The Ups and Downs of Image Retrieval".

It was basically a follow up on the paper we presented at the Mastering the Gap workshop at the European Semantic Web Conference last year.

We described the two basic approaches to image retrieval (semantic-based and content-based) and introduced the issue of the semantic gap in image retrieval, in particular by looking at the user requests to real picture libraries and archives. We then went to describe how semantic web techniques might be used to overcome some of the issues, although it's challenging when dealing with real archive data. Finally, Jon showed his amazing semantic space technique, which allows users to search collections of unannotated images using text keywords.

The slides are available in PDF (5.7M) and because of the movies/demos we used in the presentation as a Quicktime interactive movie in two sizes: large (118M) and small (13M).

The seminar itself was recored and podcast on the IAM seminar feed, but I don't think it's visible outside of ECS. We'll try to get it put somewhere sensible soon.