Visual information retrieval using Java and LIRE

Abstract

Visual information retrieval (VIR) is an active and vibrant research area, which attempts at providing means for organizing, indexing, annotating, and retrieving visual information (images and videos) form large, unstructured repositories. The goal of VIR is to retrieve the highest number of relevant matches to a given query (often expressed as an example image and/or a series of keywords). In its early years (1995-2000) the research efforts were dominated by content-based approaches contributed primarily by the image and video processing community. During the past decade, it was widely recognized that the challenges imposed by the semantic gap (the lack of coincidence between an image's visual contents and its semantic interpretation) required a clever use of textual metadata (in addition to information extracted from the image's pixel contents) to make image and video retrieval solutions efficient and effective. The need to bridge (or at least narrow) the semantic gap has been one of the driving forces behind current VIR research. Additionally, other related research problems and market opportunities have started to emerge, offering a broad range of exciting problems for computer scientists and engineers to work on. In this tutorial, we present an overview of visual information retrieval (VIR) concepts, techniques, algorithms, and applications. Several topics are supported by examples written in Java, using Lucene (an open-source Java-based indexing and search implementation) and LIRE (Lucene Image REtrieval), an open-source Java-based library for content-based image retrieval (CBIR) written by Mathias Lux.After motivating the topic, we briefly review the fundamentals of information retrieval, present the most relevant and effective visual descriptors currently used in VIR, the most common indexing approaches for visual descriptors, the most prominent machine learning techniques used in connection with contemporary VIR solutions, as well as the challenges associated with building real-world, large scale VIR solutions, including a brief overview of publicly available datasets used in worldwide challenges, contests, and benchmarks. Throughout the tutorial, we integrate examples using LIRE, whose main features and design principles are also discussed. Finally, we conclude the tutorial with suggestions for deepening the knowledge in the topic, including a brief discussion of the most relevant advances, open challenges, and promising opportunities in VIR and related areas.The tutorial is primarily targeted at experienced Information Retrieval researchers and practitioners interested in extending their knowledge of document-based IR to equivalent concepts, techniques, and challenges in VIR. The acquired knowledge should allow participants to derive insightful conclusions and promising avenues for further investigation.