A FLEXIBLE SYSTEM FOR MULTIMEDIA MANAGEMENT AND PUBLISHING

 M. Bertini, G. Becchi, A. Del Bimbo, A. Ferracani

Univ. of Florence - MICCFirenze, Italy

G. Ioannidis, A. Stan

IN2 LtdBremen, Germany

 E. Bijk 

Utrecht School of the ArtsHilversum, The Netherlands

ABSTRACT

We demonstrate the IM3I (www.im3i.eu) platform, a system that

provides a flexible approach for the management, annotation and

publishing of collections of images and videos. The system is based

on web services that allow automatic and manual annotation, re-

trieval, browsing and authoring of multimedia content.  Index Terms— Multimedia database, multimedia authoring,

content analysis, content-based retrieval.

1. INTRODUCTION

One of the most important user requirements highlighted by two

surveys conducted within two EU research projects (VidiVideo and

IM3I) with more than 50 professionals working in broadcasters, na-

tional video archives, photographic archives and cultural heritage

organizations, is that multimedia annotation and management sys-

tem have to be web-based. In fact, this requirement was deemed

“mandatory” by 75% of the interviewees and “desirable” by another

20% [1]. To satisfy this need the IM3I system, presented in this

demo, offers an integrated service-oriented environment for process-

ing, analysing, indexing, tagging, searching and publishing multime-

dia content.2. THE SYSTEM

IM3I provides a service-oriented architecture that allows for multi-

ple viewpoints of multimedia data deep inside repositories, provid-

ing better ways to reuse, repurpose and share rich media. This paves

the way for a multimedia information management platform that is

more flexible, adaptable, and customizable. In fact, it offers web-

based flexibility and a single point of access for managing and pub-

lishing multimedia content. The goal is to avoid to redesign existing

infrastructure and workflows, but rather to complement them; thanks

to the SOA paradigm it is possible to add only the required services

to an existing multimedia management system. This latter point is

particularly important when considering subjects like broadcasters

or national video archives, that can not throw away their existing

systems.

Automatic multimedia annotation is performed by user definable

processing pipelines, and services for syntactic and semantic audio

and video annotations are provided. Visual annotation is performed

using an implementation of the BoW paradigm, based on a fusion of 

MSER, SURF and SIFT features and the Pyramid Matching Kernel.

Audio annotation is based on a fusion of chroma, timbral and spec-

tral features and SVM classifiers. CBIR retrieval is performed using

MPEG-7 features. An ontology-based search and browsing engine

that uses the approach presented in [2] can be used as a service or

through Rich Internet Application interfaces. Other services and spe-

cialized interfaces allow tagging and CBIR. Publishing functionali-

ties are provided by a set of services and interfaces of the authoring

platform. This platform allows to import and publish existing media

repositories and to author web-based environments that let end-users

to interact with the repositories. Authors can create elaborate work-

flow patterns and search interfaces, that can be embedded in a variety

of commercial CMS systems. The authoring environment has been

developed as an AJAX application.

Fig. 1. Screenshots of some of the IM3I tools; from top to bottom:

semantic search, CBIR and tagging, authoring interface.

3. DEMONSTRATION

We will present a live demo of all the functionalities of the IM3I

system including: the management of automatic multimedia analysis

pipeline, the use of the manual annotation tools, the searching and

browsing tools and the authoring interfaces.

Acknowledgments The IM3I project was co-financed by the

European Commission FP7 programme (contract FP7-222267).

4. REFERENCES

[1] M. Bertini, G. D’Amico, A. Ferracani, M. Meoni, and G. Serra,

“Sirio, Orione and Pan: an integrated web system for ontology-

based video search and annotation,” in Proc. of ACM Multime-

dia (ACM MM), 2010.

[2] L. Ballan, M. Bertini, A. Del Bimbo, and G. Serra, “Video an-

notation and retrieval using ontologies and rule learning,” IEEE 

 MultiMedia, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 80–88, Oct.-Dec. 2010.