Michael Springmann

DILIGENT: integrating digital library and Grid technologies for a new Earth observation research infrastructure

This paper introduces DILIGENT, a digital library infrastructure built by integrating digital library and Grid technologies and resources. This infrastructure allows different communities to dynamically build specialised digital libraries capable to support the entire e-Science knowledge production and consumption life-cycle by using shared computing, storage, content, and application resources. The paper presents some of the main software services that implement the DILIGENT system. Moreover, it exemplifies the provided features by presenting how the DILIGENT infrastructure is being exploited in supporting the activity of user communities working in the Earth Science Environmental sector.

DelosDLMS - the integrated DELOS digital library management system

DelosDLMS is a prototype of a next-generation Digital Library (DL) management system. It is realized by combining various specialized DL functionalities provided by partners of the DELOS network of excellence. Currently, DelosDLMS combines text and audio-visual searching, offers new information visualization and relevance feedback tools, provides novel interfaces, allows retrieved information to be annotated and processed, integrates and processes sensor data streams, and finally, from a systems engineering point of view, is easily configured and adapted while being reliable and scalable. The prototype is based on the OSIRIS/ISIS platform, a middleware environment developed by ETH Zurich and now being extended at the University of Basel.

ISIS and OSIRIS: a process-based digital library application on top of a distributed process support middleware

Future information spaces such as Digital Libraries require new infrastructures that allow to use and to combine various kinds of functions in a unified and reliable way. The paradigm of service-oriented architectures (SoA) allows providing application functionality in a modular, self-contained way and to individually combine this functionality. The paper presents the ISIS/OSIRIS system which consists of a generic infrastructure for the reliable execution of distributed service-based applications (OSIRIS) and a set of dedicated Digital Library application services (ISIS) that provide, among others, content-based search in multimedia collections.

An interactive paper and digital pen interface for query-by-sketch image retrieval

A major challenge when dealing with large collections of digital images is to find relevant objects, especially when no metadata on the objects is available. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) addresses this problem but usually lacks query images that are good enough to express the users information need. Therefore, in Query-by-Sketch, CBIR has been considered with user provided sketches as query objects --- but so far, this has suffered from the limitations of existing user interfaces. In this paper, we present a novel user interface for query by sketch that exploits emergent interactive paper and digital pen technology. Users can draw sketches on paper in a user-friendly way. Search can be started interactively from the paper front-end, due to a streaming interface from the digital pen to the underlying CBIR system. We present the implementation of the interactive paper/digital pen interface on top of QbS, our system for CBIR using sketches, and we present in detail the evaluation of the system on the basis of the MIRFLICKR-25000 image collection.

A user interface for query-by-sketch based image retrieval with color sketches

This demo will interactively show a system that exploits a novel user interface, running on Tablet PCs or graphic tablets, that provides query-by-sketch based image retrieval using color sketches. The system uses Angular Radial Partitioning (ARP) for the edge information in the sketches and color moments in the CIELAB space, combined with a distance metric that is robust to deviations in color as they usually need to be taken into account with user-generated color sketches.

Image retrieval at memory's edge: known image search based on user-drawn sketches

With the increasingly growing size of digital image collections, known image search is gaining more and more importance. Especially in collections where individual objects are not tagged with metadata describing their content, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is a promising approach, but usually suffers from the unavailability of query images that are good enough to express the users information need. In this paper, we present the QbS system that provides CBIR based on user-drawn sketches. The QbS system combines angular radial partitioning for the extraction of features in the user-provided sketch, taking into account the spatial distribution of edges, and the image distortion model. This combination offers several highly relevant invariances that allow the query sketch to slightly deviate from the searched image in terms of rotation, translation, relative size, and/or unknown objects in the background. To illustrate the benefits of the approach, we present search results from the evaluation of the QbS system on the basis of the MIRFLICKR collection with 25,000 objects and compare the retrieval results of pure metadata-driven approaches, pure content-based retrieval using different sketches, and combinations thereof.

Improving efficiency and effectiveness of the image distortion model

The image distortion model (IDM) is a deformation model that is used for computing the (dis-)similarity between images. Therefore it evaluates displacements of individual pixels between two images within a so-called warp range and also takes into account the surrounding pixels (local context). It can be used with a kNN classifier and has shown good retrieval quality in handwritten character recognition as well as in past runs of the medical automatic annotation task of ImageCLEF workshops. However, one of its limitations is computational complexity and the resulting long query response times, that may limit its use for a wider range of applications and for modifications to further improve retrieval quality. In particular an enlarged local context and warp range are candidates for such improvements, but would even further increase computational complexity. In our approach, we therefore apply several optimizations that reduce the retrieval time without degrading the result quality. First, we use an early termination strategy for the individual distance computations which contribute a speedup of a factor of 4.3-4.9. Second, we make efficient use of multithreading. With these extensions, we are able to perform the IDM in less than 1.5s per query on an 8-way server and 16s on a standard Pentium 4 PC without any degradation of retrieval quality compared to the non-optimized version. We extend the possible displacements to an area of 7x7 pixels, using a local context of either 5x5 or 7x7 pixels. The results of the extended IDM have been submitted to the medical automatic annotation task of ImageCLEF 2007 and were ranked in the upper third. More importantly, the used techniques for reducing the execution time are not limited strictly to IDM but are also applicable to other expensive distance measures.

Management of and access to virtual electronic health records

Digital Libraries (DLs) in eHealth are composed of electronic artefacts that are generated and owned by different healthcare providers. A major characteristic of eHealth DLs is that information is under the control of the organisation where data has been produced. The electronic health record (EHR) of patients therefore consists of a set of distributed artefacts and cannot be materialised for organisational reasons. Rather, the EHR is a virtual entity. The virtual integration of an EHR is done by encompassing services provided by specialised application systems into processes. This paper reports, from an application point of view, on national and European attempts to standardise electronic health EHR. From a technical perspective, the paper addresses how services can be made available in a distributed way, how distributed P2P infrastructures for the management of EHRs can be evaluated, and how novel contentbased access can be provided for multimedia EHRs.