Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

European initiatives

Quaero

Participants : Laurent Amsaleg, Mathieu Ben, Sébastien Campion, Vincent Claveau, Ali Reza Ebadat, Julien Fayolle, Patrick Gros, Gylfi Gudmundsson, Camille Guinaudeau, Carryn Hayward, Hervé Jégou, Ewa Kijak, Fabienne Moreau, Stacy Payne, Christian Raymond, Pascale Sébillot.

Duration: 5 years, starting in May 2008. Prime: Technicolor.

Quaero is a large research and applicative program in the field of multimedia description (ranging from text to speech and video) and search engines. It groups 5 application projects, a joint Core Technology Cluster developing and providing advanced technologies to the application projects, and a Corpus project in charge of providing the necessary data to develop and evaluate the technologies. The large scope of QUAERO's ambitious objectives allows it to take full advantage of Texmex's many areas of research, through its tasks on: Indexing Multimedia Objects, Term Acquisition and Recognition, Semantic Annotation, Video Segmentation, Multi-modal Video Structuring, Image and video fingerprinting.

In 2011, the Quaero team of TexMex was mainly affected by the leave of Mathieu Ben, our technical coordinator and of Stacy Payne our financial coordinator. S. Payne was replaced by Carryn Hayward. Among the key fact of our participation this year is our participation to Trecvid.

IET ICT Labs - Opensem project

Participants : Morgan Bréhinier, Sébastien Campion, Guillaume Gravier, Teddy Furon, Patrick Gros, Hervé Jégou.

Duration: 1 year, starting January 2011.

OpenSEM is a project of the EIT KIC ICT Labs grouping 5 academic partners: TU Delft (The Netherlands), VTT (Finland), TU Berlin (Germany), Institut Eurecom (France) and INRIA Rennes.

The project (See http://www.opensem.eu ) builds a virtual center of excellence in order to speed up and maximize the potential for innovation in semantic media:

• Maximizing the open dissemination and impact of existing knowledge, tangible results (software, tools, demonstrations, field trial results), and rich social content (multimedia, plus metadata such as tag and ratings, plus social network information).

• Driving the immediate potential for the triple synergy between content-based analysis, user-based collaborative analysis and social networks and community building through large scale benchmarking competitions (MediaEval).

Participation to the project includes contributing software and demonstration to the OpenSEM portal as well as organizing and participating to the MediaEval 2011 benchmark initiative. As a particularly visible action, we developed the Texmix demo interface that allows the demonstration, on a corpora of news reports provided by INA, the work that was developed in the team on topic segmentation, keyword extraction, image retrieval, named entity extraction and classification. This demo was demonstrated during the fall Quaero plenary and during the INRIA-industry special day on future TV.

FIIA: Forensic image identifier and analyzer

Participants : Laurent Amsaleg, Ewa Kijak.

Duration: 32 months, starting November 2011. Prime: Videntifier Technologies.

FIIA is an innovative software service for the Forensic market that automatically identifies and analyzes the content of images on web sites and seized computers. The service saves time and money, gathers better evidence, and builds stronger court cases. We are in charge of helping with the technology needed to identify the logos from terrorist organizations that are inserted in images or videos. Challenges are related to the poor resolution and small size of logos as well as to the very strict efficiency constraints that the logo detector must match.