Presentation of the team
The explosion of the quantity numerical documents multimedia generated a very strong dynamism in the field of the multimedia indexing research. However, the range of the work undertaken by the media specialists is limited by their monomedia aspect and the quantity of the documents they can handle, a few thousands of images for example, whereas the professional applications wouold require to handle much more (a few million).
Such quantities of documents set difficult problems of structuring and storage on disc, problems which are out of the expertise of the media specialists. On the other hand, database specialists who are used this kind of the problems, consider only very rudimentary techniques of document description, by lack of know-how in this field.
To remedy that, we propose the creation of a team bringing together at the same time specialists of the media and specialists of the techniques necessary to use these documents such as data bases, information retrieval or statistics. The objective of the team is thus to be at the intersection of the two following axes :
- Definition of new document descriptors for still images, video and
text, definition of descriptors mixing several media and medata associated
with the documents, evaluation of these descriptors on great bases documents ;
- statistics for the exploration of big volumes of data, management and
stategies of calculation of the metadata and the descriptors associated
with the documents, data quality analysis, study of sparing strategies
of exploitation (navigation, indexing, research), definition of the
system and material support techniques for a fast access to these data.
The originality of our approach comes from the simultaneous consideration
of the contraints dependent on the media and the documents and of the
constraints related to the exploitation of these data, wich are two
aspects of the same problem. This multi-field approach must make it
possible to exced the limits of the current systems and to manage finely
and effectvely very significant quantities of documents.
Key words : exploration, indexing and research by content, big data bases, multimedia.
Research Directions
Our work is organized in two axes of work hich we apply to the study
of three problems.
The axes of work are :
- The description of the documents multimedia : it is a question of
being able automatically to calculate descriptors of the contents
of a document or other medata, to check the relevance and the discriminating
capacity of these descriptors at the time of research in great bases
of documents
- the use of these descriptors for the organization and management
of the bases of documents exploration and navigation, or it document
retrieval: strategies of calculation, management and maintenance of
the coherence of the descriptors and medata, analyses exploratory
data multidimensional indexing, supports systems and materials for
the systems of research.
We apply these tools to three problems :
- The search for images in great bases of images ;
- The joint descriptionj text - image of documents comprising these two media ;
- The addition of semantic capacities to the textual search engines.
Fields of application
- We first of all apply our work in the field of press and media:,
archives of videos, television,
photography and news services,
Internet and company Intranets
- The biomedical field is a large supplier of difficult data:
medical bibliographical databases,
data of imagery: anatomical and functional cerebral imagery for example,
genomic and proteomic data.
- Another applications Management of robot visual memory for motion planification
Collaborations
Support for starting the team
We were supported by the ministry of research and the STIC scintific department of CNRS (JemSTIC program).
International Collaborations
Apart from the European projects below, we have contacts with :
European projects
- aceMedia integrated project of the 6th FP:
we contribute to data indexing;
- Network of excellence MUSCLE of the 6th FP.
National projects
We participate in many national projects with academic and industrial partners. For the moment, we are active in:
- ACI masse de données DEMI-TON : description multimodale pour la structuration automatique des flux de télévision ;
Industrial contracts
:
We have priviledged contacts with Thomson company on video indexing techniques, and with the National Institute of Audiovisual.
