Special Session: Multimedia Indexing for Content Based Search

Worldwide, the volume of stored information is growing exponentially, and an increasing share is audiovisual content. This content drives the demand for new services, making audiovisual search one of the major challenges for organisations and businesses today. Digital data is the greatest value that many organisations possess, and the ability to use it, rather than just store it, will be one of the most important strategic aspects in the coming decade. In this scenario, several research efforts focused on studying advanced search architectures for enabling consumers, businesses, and organisations to unlock the values found in audiovisual content through innovative access paradigms. In particular, the focus of current researches is on managing and enabling access to information sources of all types, supporting advanced audiovisual processing and content handling that will enhance control, creation, and sharing of multimedia for all users in the value chain. Several research projects financed by the European Commission tackle this problem from different perspectives and provide diverse visions for the future. This will impact in the mid-long term on audiovisual industry, allowing companies to provide more effective and efficient access to contents thanks to innovative annotation techniques and search paradigms. The aim of this CBMI special session, organized with the support of the PHAROS project 1 , is to offer an overview of the research initiatives at European level that address the problems related to processing, annotation, indexing, and provisioning of contents within search applications. The session includes nine peer-reviewed contributions, reported in this volume, and an invited speech. The invited speech, given by professor Stefano Ceri, from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, will deliver a visionary discussion on the topic of Search Computing, a novel multi-disciplinary science which will provide the abstractions, foundations, methods, and tools required to answer cross-domain search queries, that cannot be addressed by 1 PHAROS (Platform for searcHing of Audiovisual Resources across Online Spaces) Integrated Project (IST-2005-2.6.3) financed by the EC IST 6th Framework. current search engines. A typical example of multi-domain query is “Where can I attend an interesting Information Retrieval conference close to a sunny beach, with direct flight connection to Europe and having a nice and cheap hotel accomodation?”. The generality of the problem makes it extremely relevant for the information retrieval community and poses additional challenges to the field of multimedia content annotation and indexing. The Search Computing project is currently financed by the ERC under the IDEAS Advanced Grants programme. The other contributions to the session include a work by Daras and Axenopoulos, that present a novel view-based approach for 3D object retrieval, that exploits automatic generation of a set of 2D images from a 3D object for calculating a global shape similarity between two 3D models that can support multimodal queries. The work by Bozzon, Brambilla, and Fraternali discusses the use of a model-driven approach for specifying multimedia indexing processes, verifying properties of interest in such processes, and generating the code that orchestrates the components, so as to enable rapid prototyping of content analysis processes in presence of evolving requirements. Zidouni, Quafafou, and Glotin focus on the role of structures in named entity retrieval inside audio transcription. They exploit this information, extracted through Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), for deducing an optimal hierarchical structure of the space of concepts(named entities), which are represented by nodes or any sub-paths in the hierarchy.