Klamer Schutte

Knowledge based query expansion in complex multimedia event detection

A common approach in content based video information retrieval is to perform automatic shot annotation with semantic labels using pre-trained classifiers. The visual vocabulary of state-of-the-art automatic annotation systems is limited to a few thousand concepts, which creates a semantic gap between the semantic labels and the natural language query. One of the methods to bridge this semantic gap is to expand the original user query using knowledge bases. Both common knowledge bases such as Wikipedia and expert knowledge bases such as a manually created ontology can be used to bridge the semantic gap. Expert knowledge bases have highest performance, but are only available in closed domains. Only in closed domains all necessary information, including structure and disambiguation, can be made available in a knowledge base. Common knowledge bases are often used in open domain, because it covers a lot of general information. In this research, query expansion using common knowledge bases ConceptNet and Wikipedia is compared to an expert description of the topic applied to content-based information retrieval of complex events. We run experiments on the Test Set of TRECVID MED 2014. Results show that 1) Query Expansion can improve performance compared to using no query expansion in the case that the main noun of the query could not be matched to a concept detector; 2) Query expansion using expert knowledge is not necessarily better than query expansion using common knowledge; 3) ConceptNet performs slightly better than Wikipedia; 4) Late fusion can slightly improve performance. To conclude, query expansion has potential in complex event detection.

Interactive detection of incrementally learned concepts in images with ranking and semantic query interpretation

The number of networked cameras is growing exponentially. Multiple applications in different domains result in an increasing need to search semantically over video sensor data. In this paper, we present the GOOSE demonstrator, which is a real-time general-purpose search engine that allows users to pose natural language queries to retrieve corresponding images. Top-down, this demonstrator interprets queries, which are presented as an intuitive graph to collect user feedback. Bottom-up, the system automatically recognizes and localizes concepts in images and it can incrementally learn novel concepts. A smart ranking combines both and allows effective retrieval of relevant images.

Blind late fusion in multimedia event retrieval

One of the challenges in Multimedia Event Retrieval is the integration of data from multiple modalities. A modality is defined as a single channel of sensory input, such as visual or audio. We also refer to this as data source. Previous research has shown that the integration of different data sources can improve performance compared to only using one source, but a clear insight of success factors of alternative fusion methods is still lacking. We introduce several new blind late fusion methods based on inversions and ratios of the state-of-the-art blind fusion methods and compare performance in both simulations and an international benchmark data set in multimedia event retrieval named TRECVID MED. The results show that five of the proposed methods outperform the state-of-the-art methods in a case with sufficient training examples (100 examples). The novel fusion method named JRER is not only the best method with dependent data sources, but this method is also a robust method in all simulations with sufficient training examples.

Semantic Reasoning in Zero Example Video Event Retrieval

Searching in digital video data for high-level events, such as a parade or a car accident, is challenging when the query is textual and lacks visual example images or videos. Current research in deep neural networks is highly beneficial for the retrieval of high-level events using visual examples, but without examples it is still hard to (1) determine which concepts are useful to pre-train (Vocabulary challenge) and (2) which pre-trained concept detectors are relevant for a certain unseen high-level event (Concept Selection challenge). In our article, we present our Semantic Event Retrieval System which (1) shows the importance of high-level concepts in a vocabulary for the retrieval of complex and generic high-level events and (2) uses a novel concept selection method (i-w2v) based on semantic embeddings. Our experiments on the international TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection benchmark show that a diverse vocabulary including high-level concepts improves performance on the retrieval of high-level events in videos and that our novel method outperforms a knowledge-based concept selection method.

Improving video event retrieval by user feedback

In content based video retrieval videos are often indexed with semantic labels (concepts) using pre-trained classifiers. These pre-trained classifiers (concept detectors), are not perfect, and thus the labels are noisy. Additionally, the amount of pre-trained classifiers is limited. Often automatic methods cannot represent the query adequately in terms of the concepts available. This problem is also apparent in the retrieval of events, such as bike trick or birthday party. Our solution is to obtain user feedback. This user feedback can be provided on two levels: concept level and video level. We introduce the method Adaptive Relevance Feedback (ARF) on video level feedback. ARF is based on the classical Rocchio relevance feedback method from Information Retrieval. Furthermore, we explore methods on concept level feedback, such as the re-weighting and Query Point Modification (QPM) methods as well as a method that changes the semantic space the concepts are represented in. Methods on both concept level and video level are evaluated on the international benchmark TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection (MED) and compared to state of the art methods. Results show that relevance feedback on both concept and video level improves performance compared to using no relevance feedback; relevance feedback on video level obtains higher performance compared to relevance feedback on concept level; our proposed ARF method on video level outperforms a state of the art k-NN method, all methods on concept level and even manually selected concepts.