Guest editorial: selected papers from ICIMCS 2012

Abstract

These papers cover key issues in Internet multimedia computing and services, including large-scale visual search, mobile media processing, Internet image tagging, video transmission, as well as fundamental technologies for intelligent multimedia computing, such as image segmentation, logo recognition, and object tracking. The first article “Visual word expansion and BSIFT verification for large-scale image search” by Zhou et al. presents a visual word expansion method improving the recall of retrieval on large-scale image collections and a binary SIFT verification method boosting the retrieval precision. The former represents a query image as the aggregation of visual words of local features in the query and the neighboring words of these query words. The latter verifies feature matching between images based on the binarized SIFT feature. The work is experimented on two public image data sets. The second article “Accurate sensing of scene geo-context via mobile visual localization” by Liu et al. proposes a new mobile image geo-tagging approach toward accurate location tagging for images captured in urban areas. For a landmark image, the approach infers comprehensive and accurate geo-context of the image, including camera location, view direction, and scene location, by exploiting large-scale image retrieval and 3D reconstruction techniques. Experimental results on the San Francisco street view data set, which consists of approximately 150 k panoramic images in San Francisco at about 4-m intervals, have demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach. The third article entitled “Tag ranking based on salient region graph propagation” by Tang et al. presents a new tag ranking solution to rank user-contributed tags associated with Internet images. The solution exploits salient regions in images and ranks tags by integrating visual clues from entire images and salient regions of images. It constructs two sparse graphs over images and salient sub-images, International Conference on Internet Multimedia Computing and Services (ICIMCS) is an annual conference sponsored by ACM SIGMM China Chapter. The conference is especially interested in the latest technologies and applications that deal with the Web-scale processing and management of heterogeneous data from the Internet for multimedia computing and service. ICIMCS 2012 was held in Wuhan, China. The conference attracted around 90 participants, including researchers from academia and industries across ten countries/regions, for sharing their recent works on the topics ranging from visual feature representation and analysis to visual recognition and classification, and from social and mobile media analysis to multimedia services. This special issue comprises the extended versions of seven papers, including three best papers and four papers from the regular and special sessions of ICIMCS 2012.