Semedia Overview

Group Interface (UG) is an attempt to over come many of the problems associated with video search. We present a novel video retrieval system that allows users to create semantic groups to help conceptualise and organise their results for complex video search tasks. The interface allows users to organise their results into semantic groups and to share results between multiple groups, these groups can be used to launch new searches thus allowing users to view multiple result sets simultaneously. In addition the interactions of the user are used to provide some collaborative recommendations that encapsulate numerous aspects of the users interests.

Video Browsing Tool (JRS) is an application for browsing in a video collection by clustering and filtering video segments based on content-based features. The central component of the user interface is a light table view which shows the current content set and cluster structure using a number of representative frames for each of the clusters. The clusters are visualised by coloured areas around the keyframes. A typical browsing session consists of repeated clustering and reducing content by selecting individual clusters.

Concept-based Video Explorer (FBM-UPF) is geared towards divergent content exploration. A web-based tool allows people to browse multimedia repositories by exploring the conceptual relationships that exist between them. Concepts and their relationships to an initial search concept are organized visually using a bubble metaphor. The interface uses drag-n-drop to refine each query to obtain visual representations within a topic domain or for searching for specific imagery.

TagExplorer (Yahoo!) is a tool for browsing Flickr photos using textual keywords -- a.k.a. tags. The TagExplorer helps the user browsing the collection by generating a cloud of words related to the user's query. The user can use the suggested words to further refine her query or to browse related topics. To make the tag clouds more functional and easy to use the TagExplorer organizes the tag cloud by groupping together words with similar meaning.

VideoTagGame (Yahoo!) is a multi-player game for collecting time-based annotations over video. The players watch a video simultaneously and type keywords that describe the corresponding moment in the video. If the players agree on keywords in a small timeframe they receive points. Ultimately, the data collected by the game will enable the retrieval of relevant parts in a video, rather than returning the entire video as unit of retrieval.

PhotoSearch (Yahoo!) is an application for searching photos. It is a keyword-based search application that searches Flickr photos based on metadata information added by the photo owners. The main features of PhotoSearch are various tools for assisting the user in the search process. The tools allow the user to disambiguate ambiguous queries, expand queries with related terms, and to get metadata-similar images for an example image.