My apology if you have received multiple copies of this CFP.
ACM SIGIR'99 Post-Conference Workshop on
Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval
Berkeley, CA, August 15 - 19, 1999
Call For Participation
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Background
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This workshop is a follow-up to last year's very successful workshop on the
same topic. Since the field is advancing so rapidly, it was felt that an
annual workshop would be worthwhile.
The focus is 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 yield
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.
Finally, we will also devote one session to discussing MPEG-7 standards and
content. By the time of the workshop, the selection committee would have made
their choices for standards.
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 18th. Decisions will be made no later
than Friday, July 2nd. In the case of paper submission, the final camera-ready
papers are due on July 23rd. Working notes will be made available
to all participants at the workshop. All the submissions should be sent to:
Dr. Rohini K. Srihari
CEDAR/SUNY at Buffalo
UB Commons
520 Lee Entrance, Suite 202
Amherst, NY 14228 - 2583
Email: [log in to unmask]
Phone: (716) 645-6164 ext. 102 Fax: (716) 645-6176
Organization
------------
Workshop chairs (also program chairs):
Rohini K. Srihari
CEDAR, SUNY at Buffalo
Amherst, NY 14228 - 2583
[log in to unmask]
Zhongfei Zhang
CEDAR, SUNY at Buffalo
Amherst, NY 14228 - 2583
[log in to unmask]
R. Manmatha
Computer Science Dept., Univ. of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
[log in to unmask]
S. Ravela
Computer Science Dept., Univ. of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
[log in to unmask]
Timetable
---------
Paper or statement of interest submission:
June 18th, 1999.
Decision:
July 2nd, 1999.
Camera-Ready Paper Due:
July 23rd, 1999
SIGIR Conference:
August 15 - 19, 1999
Workshop Date:
to be announced.
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/sigir99/
or the SIGIR Conference main Web Page at
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/conferences/sigir99/
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