CBMI 2010 - Report

I presented last month the article entitled "A Kernel-Based Strategy for Exploratory Image Collection Search" at the 8th International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI) . The conference proceeding are published in http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=5513763

This conference was very important for me, the works presented at the conference were very aligned to the research that I am doing in my doctoral thesis. The most relevant works are:

• A Fast Algorithm for Music Search by Similarity in Large Databases based on Modified Symetrized Kullback Leibler Divergence, Christophe Charbuillet, Geoffroy Peeters, Stanislav Barton and Valerie Gouet-Brunet.
• Active Learning with Multiple Classifiers for Multimedia Indexing, Bahjat SAFADI and Georges Quénot.
• Visual Object Tracking Based on Incremental Kernel PCA, Li Sun and Guizhong Liu.
• VERGE: A Video Interactive Retrieval Engine, Stefanos Vrochidis, Anastasia Moumtzidou, Paul King, Anastasios.
• Evaluation of Video Summaries, Yingbo Li, Bernard Merialdo.
• A New Spatial Weighting Scheme for Bag-of-Visual-Words, Ismail El sayad, Jean Martinet, Thierry Urruty and Chabane Djeraba.
• A kernel-based active learning strategy for content-based image retrieval, Daoudi, I., Idrissi, K.
  

During the conference I did some research contacts. Specially, professor Jenny Benois offers me to do an internship at Analyse et Indexation Vidéo Lab (LaBRI) in Bordeaux-France. So I am working in serching for funds to travel next year. These are the main contacts:

• Professor Jenny Benois-Pineau, full professor of Computer science at the University Bordeaux 1 and chair of Video Analysis and Indexing research group in Image and Sound Department of LABRI UMR 58000 UniversitéBordeaux1/Bordeaux2/CNRS/ENSEIRB.
• Professor Titus Zaharia, ARTEMIS Department at TELECOM & Management SudParis. Professor Titus works in visual content indexing and coding, and include feature extraction, image and video segmentation, motion detection and estimation, 2D/3D reconstruction, virtual character modelling and animation, virtual/augmented reality, digital interactive TV, calibration techniques, and color image processing.
  

Google image-swirl and some ideas

I always asked to myself why Google and other search engines do not offered to the user new interaction/visualization mechanisms whether there have been many initiatives in this field. Actually, one of the first papers appeared almost ten years ago [Chen00]. Frofesor Fabio said to me that new technologies take much time to appear due to they are subject to "the convergence". Well, he had reason ;). To my surprise, Google recently published a new demo lab tool, called image-swirl, that allow the user to visually interact with its large image repository. In this screen shot, I show an example of the system. This initiative is very nice and motivating for my research.

I was searching by "carcinoma". The interaction begins with a set of piles of images organized according to cluster of similar images. One you select one pile, it goes to the front (expanded in a circle) whilst the rest go to the background. While you interact with the collection, a spiral shape preserves the navigation path. This tool has what an Information Visualization (IV) metaphor must have, which Ben Shneiderman calls IV mantra: “Overview, zoom and filter, details on demand” [1].

A visualization metaphor depends on the domain context and on the task. I am not sure that it is at all suitable to medical domain. That is, imagine a pathology's student navigating a collection of basal cell carcinoma images in order to learn about the presence of a pathology concept. He/her probably will need a visualization/interaction tool that allow him/her to do this task easily and quickly. I think that is a good research question what is a good visualization metaphor to this case, and how it can improve learning tasks. We could address this question in a master thesis :).

It is difficult to build a good similarity function to this concept using only low-level features (color, textures, borders) or combination of them with a priori information provided by the expert. One possibility to reduce this semantic gap is trying to fusion different information sources (text, images, audio, etc.) to construct this similarity function (what Juanca is doing), and another possibility is to reduce this semantic gap but learning from the user interaction. That is, we begin with a basic similarity function and through the user interaction we adapt this similarity function.

I have been reviewing the literature from information retrieval perspective about learning the similarity function through user interaction. I found that this area has been very active since some years ago. Actually, I found some approaches where the kernel matrix changes in each iteration, and I also found some papers addressing this issue but in the medical context.

I will talk about my reviewing in more detail in the next post.

Enjoy image-swirl.

;)

[1] Ben Shneiderman. The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations. In Proc. 1996 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages (VL’96), pages 336–343. IEEE Computer Society, Boulder, Colorado. doi:10.1109/VL.1996.545307. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/shneiderman96eyes.html.

BiMed poster for SIPAIM

This is the poster about BiMed we will present at SIPAIM, although it is already printed, suggestions are welcome ;).

Download PDF

CIARP 2009

Yesterday, I arrived from Mexico. I attended to the CIARP conference to present the paper A Multi-class Kernel Alignment Method for Image Collection Summarization. The conference was really interesting, there were good works, contacts and tutorials.

I want to highlight in this blog four main things: feedback, related work, contacts and some photos :|.

Feedback
The oral presentation was fine ;). The time allocated was sufficient to convey the main ideas of the article. In the question's part I answered them satisfactory. I feel the work was interesting for the audience. Actually, the Director of CENATAV (Centro de Aplicaciones de Tecnologías de Avanzada) approached me at the end of my presentation, to invite Colombia belongs to the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IACR). I will describe it with more details in contact's section.

Related work
In the conference there were too many works related to image processing, some about robot vision, analysis of signal, video segmentation and tracking, computer vision and document processing. Here the conference proceedings.

With respect to my research, the following ones are the most relevant:

• A Brief Index for Proximity Searching. Eric Sadit Téllez et al.
  In this work, authors propose a method to quickly find similar objects in large databases. They propose to create an index structure and an algorithm based on permutations. Basically, they performs approximate search in metric spaces using the k nearest neighbor strategy.
• Automatic Choice of the Number of Nearest Neighbors in Locally Linear Embedding. Juliana Valencia-Aguirre et al.
  In this paper, authors propose to automatically find the number of nearest neighbors k in the computation of the LLE (Locally Linear Embedding) algorithm, a method for dimensionality reduction. The define a cost function that quantifies the quality of the embedding results. Normally, the k value is set manually in the algorithm which may cause that the results are not the best. They visually show how can be found this parameter and experiment with artificial and real-world data sets.
• Learning an Efficient Texture Model by Supervised Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction Methods. Elnaz Barshan et al.
  Authors investigate the problem of texture recognition under varying lighting and viewing conditions. They use textons [1], which describe local properties of textures. The high dimensionality of the textons and feature histograms make it necessary to find suitable methods in order to address the dimensionality reduction tasks, that is, methods that allow to guide algorithms making use of a priori information (unsupervised learning). Authors use a supervised nonlinear dimensionality reduction method called CMVU (Colored Maximum Variance Unfolding) [2].

Other interesting works:

• Randomized Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis for Scene Recognition. Erik Rodner and Joachim Denzler.
• Dynamic Image Segmentation Method Using Hierarchical Clustering. Jorge Galbiati et al.
• A New Unsupervised Learning for Clustering Using Geometric Associative Memories. Benjamín Cruz et al.
• Simple Noise Robust Feature Vector Selection Method for Speaker Recognition. Gabriel Hernández et al.
• A Speed-Up Hierarchical Compact Clustering Algorithm for Dynamic Document Collections. Reynaldo Gil-García et al.
• A New Incremental Algorithm for Overlapped Clustering. Ariel Pérez Suárez.
• Improved Online Support Vector Machines Spam Filtering Using String Kernels. Ola Amayri and Nizar Bouguila.
  

Contacts

• José Ruiz Shulcloper. He is the Director of the CENETAV and member of the IAPR. He propose to me to involve Colombia as member of the IAPR, that is, to create the Colombian Society of Pattern Recognition. There are various countries in this association and he said to me that Colombia should be also member. The idea is to talk with professor Fabio about our interest in belonging to this association. If we are interested on, we have to write to José Ruiz and he will send to us what are the requirements.
• Hector Allende. He is president of the Chilean Society of Pattern Recognition and Director of the Doctorate Program at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (UTFSM). He works in Machine Learning and Computational Intelligence. He said to us that he works in base ML research and supports other groups in applied research. I think that he is an importa
  
• Gabriel Hernández. Gabriel is a PhD student of the CENETAV. He is working on Pattern Recognition and presented an interesting work in the conference. His work is focused on Speaker Recognition.
  
• Carlos Martínez. Carlos is a PhD student at University of Exeter (UK). He works on the field of 2D and 3D image processing. The topic of his thesis is based on developing shape descriptors both for 2D and 3D shapes, and test their possible applications for image analysis, classification, and recognition.

Photos

Well, after an interesting conference it was necessary some of tourism. Here some photos of Teotihuacan:

Pyramid of the Sun
























The Pyramid of the Sun and the Avenue of the Dead from the Pyramid of the moon.












References

[1] Leung, T.K., Malik, J. Representing and recognizing the visual appearance of materials using three-dimensional textons. International Journal of Computer Vision 43(1), 29-44 (2001).

[2] Smola, A.J., Borgwardt, K.M., Song, L., Gretton, A. Colored maximum variance unfolding. In: NIPS (2007).

Microsoft eScience presentation

The Workshop has an interesting program: Carnigie Mellon, Oxford, Harvard, ... , Universidad Nacional de Colombia

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/escience2009/agenda.aspx

Universidad Nacional de Colombia: "Presente, presente, presente."

MedViz and BiMed videos

I published two videos were MedViz and BiMed functionalities are shown. They are online at http://camargoj.googlepages.com (Software section).

Server migration

The server migration was not easy. It was necessary to collect the source code of all modules, change parameters, compile and redeploy. But finally, it is on-line. http://www.informed.unal.edu.co