This is an implementation of the Differential Edit Distance (DED) metric, a unidimensional measure that has been developed to evaluate video scenes segmentation results. It compares the scene segmentation results of an automatic scene segmentation system with the ground-truth scene segmentation and estimates their similarity in terms of the number of shots that need to change scene in order to make the two segmentations identical. The software input is two .txt files containing the segmentation under comparison and the output is their distance, which can be also saved or appended in a .txt file. The software can be also used to compare any label strings that correspond to sets of well-ordered objects.

MK Group at CERTH has released an iPhone application for ClustTour. ClustTour mobile enables an intuitive exploration of the interesting landmarks and events for more than 30 cities worldwide, making use of automatic analysis methods on large amounts of tagged photos from Flickr.
The application is available for free on iTunes:
http://clusttour.gr/itunes

The European Commission published an article about WeKnowIt in the Technology Marketplace section of CORDIS website. Yiannis Kompatsiaris was interviewed, revealing the WeKnowIt objectives, the project's course, its results and their impact so far.

Our Group will cooperate with the Thessaloniki International Film Festival aiming to exploit new social media analysis technologies for enhancing experience of the Festival attendants. To this end a Cooperation Agreement has been signed between CERTH-ITI and the Festival. Most of the activities will be in the framework of the SocialSensor project, which is coordinated by CERTH-ITI.

Η ομάδα Πολυμέσων  του ΙΠΤΗΛ θα συνεργαστεί με το Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης με στόχο την αξιοποίηση νέων τεχνολογιών ανάλυσης κοινωνικού περιεχομένου για την παροχή προηγμένων υπηρεσιών στους επισκέπτες του. Για το σκοπό αυτό υπογράφτηκε Μνημόνιο Συνεργασίας μεταξύ του ΙΠΤΗΛ και του Φεστιβάλ. Μεγάλο μέρος των κοινών δράσεων θα υποστηρίζονται από την ερευνητική προσπάθεια στα πλαίσια του έργου SocialSensor, που συντονίζεται από το ΙΠΤΗΛ.

CERTH-ITI participated to the Known-Item Search (KIS) Task of TRECVID 2011 with the interactive video retrieval engine VERGE. VERGE produced the best results, among the submissions made by all institutions participating to TRECVID 2011 KIS task (12 runs from 4 different institutions) with interactive systems. The latest version of VERGE supports advanced retrieval functionalities including visual similarity search, visual concept-based retrieval, user implicit feedback-based fusion, video similarity based on PLSA and full text search. More information about VERGE is available here. Feel free to try on line the latest version of VERGE and search in the TRECVID 2011 KIS test data collection.

Our group participates in two new integrated projects of the Networked Media Unit starting October 1st, SocialSensor - "Sensing User Generated Input for Improved Media Discovery and Experience" and LinkedTV - "Television Linked To The Web".

Invited speech on "Search Computing: Business Areas, Research and Socio-economic Challenges" given by Yiannis Kompatsiaris at the "Search Computing and Social Media" workshop, organized in conjunction with NEM Summit 2011.

WeKnowIt related invited speech on "Extracting Emergent Semantics from Large-Scale User Generated Content" given by Yiannis Kompatsiaris at the ICT Innovations 2011 conference.

Summary and important dates

Y. Kompatsiaris and S. Nikolopoulos are the editors of the just published white paper on "Search Computing: Bussiness areas, Research and socio-economic challenges" that consolidates the expert's opinion about the future opportunities and trends in the search industry. The effort was coordinated by the CHORUS+ project, with the contribution of the Media Search Cluster network.

The paper can accessed through http://www.avmediasearch.eu/white_paper_Search_computing.

Social Event Detection (SED) in tagged photo collections

CERTH-ITI successfully participated in the Social Event Detection task of the MediaEval 2011 workshop. MediaEval, a workshop focused on focused evaluation tasks with respect to multimedia analysis, took place in Pisa, Italy (1-2 September 2011). CERTH took part in the Social Event Detection (SED) task that involved two challenges: (a) detection of soccer events in two major European cities, (b) detection of events taking place in two specific venues. Both challenges were defined on a large set of about 75000 images from Flickr. A more detailed definition of the task is available here.

In the first challenge, CERTH achieved the best results, while in the second one its performance was close to the median. The approach employed by CERTH is described here, while the presentation given at the workshop is available here. We have also made available the implementation of the approach in the form of a Java library. You can read more details here.

Read our chapter "Multimedia, Broadcasting and eCulture" in the new Handbook of Semantic Web Technologies

The book Knowledge-Driven Multimedia Information Extraction and Ontology Evolution - Bridging the Semantic Gap is now available. It covers the state of the art in the fields of ontology evolution and information extraction from multimedia, while  promoting the synergy between these two fields, by presenting a sound theoretical framework as well as concrete examples of applications.

The contents stem largely from the research work conducted over a period of three years under the framework of the EU research project BOEMIE (Bootstrapping Ontology Evolution with Multimedia Information Extraction). The online version can be accessed here.