[OPLIN 4cast] OPLIN 4cast #414: Image search research

Wed Dec 3 10:30:11 EST 2014

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OPLIN 4Cast

OPLIN 4cast #414: Image search research
December 3rd, 2014

search iconHow many times have you had a library patron say, "I once 
read a really good book, it had a red cover with a bicycle on the front 
[or some other cover description] - can you find that for me again?" 
That kind of request to basically find a described image (the book 
cover) doesn't just happen in libraries anymore. As the content of the 
Internet continues to shift from text to graphics, accurately searching 
for images based on a general description becomes more and more 
important to some of the biggest Internet companies. In the past couple 
of weeks, researchers at both Google and Yahoo (owner of Flickr) have 
posted some interesting news about their recent work to improve image 
searching.

  * A picture is worth a thousand (coherent) words: Building a natural
    description of images
    <http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth-thousand-coherent.html>
    (Google Research Blog | Oriol Vinyals, Alexander Toshev, Samy
    Bengio, and Dumitru Erhan) "But accurately describing a complex
    scene requires a deeper representation of what's going on in the
    scene, capturing how the various objects relate to one another and
    translating it all into natural-sounding language. Many efforts to
    construct computer-generated natural descriptions of images propose
    combining current state-of-the-art techniques in both computer
    vision <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision> and natural
    language processing
    <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing> to form a
    complete image description approach
    <https://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Eafarhadi/papers/sentence.pdf>. But what
    if we instead merged recent computer vision and language models into
    a single jointly trained system, taking an image and directly
    producing a human readable sequence of words to describe it?"
  * Image search, analysis emerge as powerful tools, privacy threat
    <http://www.eweek.com/cloud/image-search-analysis-emerge-as-powerful-tools-privacy-threat-2.html>
    (eWeek | Mike Elgan) "In a nutshell, these systems identify objects
    in a photograph-say, a boy, a dog, a ball, a tree, a park, a bird,
    some clouds and so on-then use sophisticated artificial intelligence
    to understand that the boy is throwing the ball for the dog to chase
    in a park and that the bird isn't involved in the main action of the
    photo. Combine this technology with face recognition and anyone with
    access (which will be everyone) will be able to search the Web for
    people doing things or involved with or associated with some activity."
  * Science powering product: Yahoo Weather
    <http://yahoolabs.tumblr.com/post/103469857701/science-powering-product-yahoo-weather>
    (Yahoo Labs | David A. Shamma, Jia Li, Lyndon Kennedy, and Bart
    Thomée) "But even more difficult than finding a stunning photo that
    accurately reflects the weather in a given location is the challenge
    of finding what the Flickr community believes is an interesting
    weather photo. A little while before we set out to surface our one
    million photos, we made an observation about how people designate
    photos on Flickr as 'favorites.' Something as simple as favorites
    and likes on social network sites are rich social signals that can
    be used to surface themes of images."
  * Finding an image with an image and other feats of computer vision
    <http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/11/finding-an-image-with-an-image-and-other-feats-of-computer-vision/>
    (Ars Technica | Megan Geuss) "Yahoo's efforts to make photo search
    better has a simple mantra: 'more relevant photos for users, not
    just the most popular photos,' as Li put it. To that extent, Flickr
    tries to improve general search while also improving search
    relevance within a person's likely-massive online photo album.
    Shamma noted that batch upload and the gigabytes and terabytes of
    storage offered to customers at relatively cheap prices have changed
    how we photograph things. Accordingly, storage and recall of
    photographs has to adapt to fit the morphing definition of
    photography. 'The practice of photography is changing very quickly,
    using photos for communication has been growing,' Shamma said."

*/Articles from Ohio Web Library <http://ohioweblibrary.org>:/*

  * Leveraging multimedia in web search.
    <http://web.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.oplin.org/chc/detail?sid=4526ea1f-cbdc-4b82-8091-5653d181d008%40sessionmgr4001&vid=0&hid=4106&bdata=JnNpdGU9Y2hjLWxpdmU%3d#db=cmh&AN=86149983>
    (/Online Searcher/, March/April 2013, p62-64 | Greg R. Notess)
  * Getting the picture.
    <http://web.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.oplin.org/lrc/detail/detail?sid=a99c1848-0729-4bc6-8ece-8b1c8c1f2732%40sessionmgr4003&vid=0&hid=4106&bdata=JnNpdGU9bHJjLWxpdmU%3d#db=lfh&AN=25902122>
    (/European Journal of English Studies/, Aug. 2007, p193-206 | Julia
    Thomas)
  * Finding images in an online public access catalogue: Analysis of
    user queries, subject headings, and description notes.
    <http://web.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.oplin.org/ehost/detail/detail?sid=c1fb0d11-4c1c-4536-88b4-31ce07ab5bff%40sessionmgr4004&vid=0&hid=4106&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=74267899>
    (/Canadian Journal of Information & Library Sciences/, Sept. 2010,
    p271-295 | Youngok Choi and Ingrid Hsieh-Yee)

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