Subject: multimedia indexing and retrieval

acm sigir ' 98 post - conference workshop multimedia indexing and retrieval melbourne , australia , august 28 , 1998 call for participation background : this workshop will focus on the required functionality , techniques , and evaluation criteria for multimedia information retrieval systems . researchers have been investigating content-based retrieval from non-text sources such as images , audio and video . initially , the focus of these efforts were on content analysis and retrieval techniques tailored to a specific media ; more recently , researchers have started to combine attributes from various media . the goal of multimedia ir systems is to handle general queries such as " find outdoor pictures or video of clinton and gore discussing environmental issues " . answering such queries requires intelligent exploitation of both text / speech and visual content . multimedia ir is a very broad area covering both infrastructure issues ( e . g . efficient storage criteria , networking , client-server models ) and intelligent content analysis and retrieval . since this is a one-day workshop , we have chosen three focus areas in the intelligent analysis and retrieval area . about the workshop : the first focus of this workshop is on integrating information from various media sources in order to handle multimodal queries on large , diverse databases . an example of such a collection would be the www . in such cases , a query may be decomposed into a set of media queries , each involving a different indexing scheme . the interaction of various media sources that occur in the same context ( e . g . , text accompanying pictures , audio accompanying video ) is of special interest ; such interaction can be exploited in both the content analysis and retrieval phases . the second focus deals with examples of research using content and organization of multimedia information into semantic classes . users pose and expect a retrieval to provide answers to semantic questions . in practice this is difficult to achieve . building structures that encode semantic information in a fairly domain independent and robust manner is extremely difficult . a quick review of computer vision research over the last few years points to this difficulty . in many cases , image content can be used in conjunction with user interaction and domain specificity to retrieve semantically meaningful information . however , it is clear that retrieval by similarity of visual attributes when used arbitrarily cannot provide semantically meaningful information . for example , a search for a red flower by color red on a very heterogeneous database cannot be expected to yeild meaningful results . on the other hand retrieval of red flowers in a database of flowers can be achieved using color . in context therefore , examples of research using content and organization of multimedia information into semantic classes will be discussed . many systems , particularly image and video based ones require an example picture which can be used as a query ( alternatively , the user may be required to draw a picture ) . it may be unrealistic to expect an example image to be always available . thus , it would be useful to find ways of generating new queries . can nlp techniques be combined with computer vision techniques to generate such queries ? or can multimodal retrieval techniques be combined to create queries suitable for image , video and audio retrieval ? in general , a question is how can we create realistic queries for realistic systems . the third focus of this workshop is on evaluation techniques for multimedia retrieval . currently , most researchers are using the standard evaluation measures defined for text documents ; these need to be extended / modified for multimedia documents . there is also a high degree of subjectivity involved that needs to be addressed . we will focus on the following specific topics : - content analysis and retrieval from various media ( text , images , video , audio ) - interaction of modalities ( e . g . text , images ) in indexing , retrieval - effective user interfaces ( permitting query refinement etc . ) - evaluation methodologies for multimedia information . we have found that researchers pay insufficient attention to it . - techniques for relevance ranking - multimodal query formation / decomposition - logic formalisms for multimodal queries - indexing and retrieval from scanned documents - e . g extracting text from images , word spotting - as a retrieval technique for both handwritten and printed documents . - testbeds for evaluating multimodal retrieval : it would be nice to have some resource sharing here since annotating these , and coming up with a good query set are difficult participation : two types of participation are expected . those interested in making a presentation at this workshop should submit their full papers either in online postscript version or in hardcopy by regular mail to the address given below . the papers should not exceed 5 , 000 words , including figures , tables , and references . those interested in participating , but not presenting papers , should submit a statement of interest , not to exceed 500 words . this should clearly state what aspect ( s ) of the workshop reflect their research interest . these will be used to select panelists . both types of submissions are due on friday , june 5th . decisions will be made no later than friday , june 26th . in the case of paper submission , the final camera-ready papers are due on july 24th . working notes will be made available to all participants at the workshop . all the submissions should be sent to : prof . rohini k . srihari , cedar / suny at buffalo ub commons 520 lee entrance , suite 202 amherst , ny 14228 - 2583 rohini @ cedar . buffalo . edu organization : workshop chairs ( also program chairs ) rohini k . srihari , suny at buffalo ( rohini @ cedar . buffalo . edu ) zhongfei zhang , suny at buffalo ( zhongfei @ cedar . buffalo . edu ) r . manmatha , university of massachussetts ( manmatha @ cs . umass . edu ) s . ravela , university of massachussetts ( ravela @ cs . umass . edu ) program committee members : shih - fu chang ( columbia u . , usa ) david harper ( robert gordon university , u . k . ) alex hauptmann ( cmu , usa ) rakesh kumar ( sarnoff , usa ) desai narasimhalu ( isi , singapore ) candace sidner ( lotus , usa ) peter schauble ( eth , switzerland ) timetable : paper or statement of interest submission : june 5th , 1998 decision : july 3rd , 1998 camera - ready paper due : july 24th , 1998 sigir conference : august 24th - 28th , 1998 workshop : august 29th , 1998 further information : further questions may be directed to the address above , or go to the web page of this workshop at http : / / www . cedar . buffalo . edu / sigir98 / mmtr . html or the sigir conference main web page at http : / / www . cs . mu . oz . au / sigir98 /
