CfP: Special Issue of MTAP on Semantic Multimedia

Call for Papers: Multimedia Tools and Applications, Springer

*** Special issue on "Semantic Multimedia" ***

Growing amounts of multimedia data of various modalities (video, audio, 3D objects, etc.) make management, distribution of and access to multimedia material ever harder, both for lay and professional users. Novel approaches, bridging the large disparity between descriptors computed automatically from multimedia content and subjectivity and context in user interpretation and interaction, are required. It still needs to be further explored how technologies from different research areas can be used to increase the value of multimedia content, e.g. to assist multimedia representation, analysis and annotation with semantics and knowledge based methods.
This special issue invites high quality contributions addressing related theoretical and practical aspects of semantic multimedia. We especially invite the submission of extended versions of papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (SAMT 2009) and at the attached workshops.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF MULTIMEDIA
- Knowledge assisted multimedia analysis
- Content-based multimedia analysis linked with natural language/speech processing

SEMANTIC RETRIEVAL OF MULTIMEDIA
- Semantic-driven multimedia indexing and retrieval
- Semantic retrieval of 3D objects
- Machine Learning and relevance feedback for finding semantics
- Semantic-driven multimedia content adaptation/summarization

SEMANTIC METADATA MANAGEMENT OF MULTIMEDIA
- Metadata management for multimedia
- Multimedia ontologies and infrastructures
- Standards bridging the multimedia and knowledge domains  

USER INTERFACES FOR SEMANTIC MULTIMEDIA
- Interfaces and personalization for interaction with large multimedia repositories
- Semantic media annotation
- Inference and machine learning for semi-automatic annotation
- Browsing multimedia archives
- Device-specific access to and adaptation of multimedia

SEMANTICS IN VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS
- illustrative depiction and rendering
- mapping meaning to presentation content
- smart virtual environments
- supporting knowledge discovery

APPLICATIONS OF SEMANTIC MULTIMEDIA
- Social multimedia tagging
- Context, user, network, semantics-aware media engineering
- Multimedia mash-ups
- Case studies with clear, innovative lessons learned

Important Dates
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Submission of papers: 15 February 2010
Submission of final accepted papers: 15 May 2010
Submissions
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All the papers should be full journal length versions and follow the guidelines set out by Multimedia Tools and Applications (http://www.springer.com/computer/information+systems/journal/11042).
Submissions should be uploaded to http://mtap.editorialmanager.com choosing "Semantic Multimedia" as article type, no later than February 15, 2010.

Guest Editors
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Werner Bailer, JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Austria
Bernard Mérialdo, Eurecom, France
Yiannis Kompatsiaris, ITI, Greece
Tat-Seng Chua, National University of Singapore
The CfP can be found at http://www.samt2009.org/sites/default/files/mtap_cfp_flyer_v1.pdf

Workshop on the Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics

This workshop was held together with ACM Multimedia and comprised an interesting keynote about semantic video annotation using ontologies. It seems that classical knowledge engineering is approaching the search/metadata/annotation community. Anyway, the talk was very interesting at it shows a way to generate more complex rules (SWRL) from basic rules based on the ontology. That is, annotating multimedia content by applying reasoning techniques on top of ontologies.

During this workshop I learned - among others - about Multimedia OWL (MOWL) that describes spatio-temporal relationships of objects within media including a probabilistic association thereof.

Btw. I also presented our results of the MPEG core experiement related to the semantics of MPEG-21 Digital Items. People agreed that we need an equivalent of an audio/video decoder but for metadata. Current metadata specifications define the syntax (+semantics) only but no means how to "decode" metadata.

ACM Multimedia 2009 will be held in Beijing and 2010 in Florence.

Workshop Program: Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics

The program for the 2nd International Workshop on the Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics which is part of ACM Multimedia 2008 is available now. It seems that it will be a very interesting workshop. I'm looking forward seeing you in Vancouver in October...

8:30 - 10:00am – Keynote Talk: Dr. Alberto del Bimbo

Session Chair: William I. Grosky

Learning Ontology Rules for Semantic Video Annotation

Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, Giuseppe Serra

10:00 - 10:30am – Coffee Break

10:30am- 12:00 – Session 1: Annotation: Ad-Hoc and Standards-Based

Session Chair: Farshad Fotouhi

Chants and Orcas: Semi-Automatic Tools for Audio Annotation and Analysis in Niche Domains

Steven Ness, Matthew Wright, Luis Gustavo Martins, George Tzanetakis

The Semantics of MPEG-21 Digital Items Revisited

Christian Timmerer, Maria Teresa Andrade, Pedro Carvalho, Davide Roagi, Giovanni Cordara

Multimedia Knowledge Management Using Ontologies

Antonio Penta, Antonio Picariello, Letizia Tanca

12:00 - 1:30pm – Lunch

1:30 - 3:00pm – Session 2: User-Based and Event Semantics

Session Chair: Giuseppe Amato

Affective Ranking of Movie Scenes Using Physiological Signals and Content Analysis

Mohammad Soleymani, Guillaume Chanel, Joep Kierkels, Thierry Pun

An Exploratory Study on Joint Analysis of Visual Classification in Narrow Domains and the Discriminative Power of Tags

Oge Marques, Mathias Lux

Spatio-Temporal Query for Multimedia Database

Sujal Wattamwar, Hiranmay Ghosh

3:00 - 3:30pm – Coffee Break

3:30 - 4:30pm – Session 3: Short Papers and Demos

Session Chair: Peter Stanchev

Employing a Photo’s Life Cycle for Multimedia Retrieval

Philipp Sandhaus, Susanne Boll

Use of Weighted Visual Terms for Machine Learning Techniques for Image Content Recognition Relying on MPEG-7 Visual Descriptors

Giuseppe Amato, Pasquale Savino

The Semantics of MPEG-21 Digital Items Revisited

Quite recently our paper has been accepted by the 2nd International Workshop on the Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics which is part of ACM Multimedia 2008. The abstract and reference is given below and for rest I will hopefully meet you in Vancouver end of October'08.

Abstract

The MPEG-21 standard forms a comprehensive multimedia framework covering the entire multimedia distribution chain. In particular, it provides a flexible approach to represent, process, and transact complex multimedia objects which are referred to as Digital Items (DIs). DIs can be quite generic, independent of the application domain, and can encompass a diversity of media resources and metadata. This flexibility has an impact on the level of interoperability between systems and applications, since not all the functionality needs to be implemented. Furthermore, additional semantic rules may be implemented through the processing of the Digital Item which is possibly driven by proprietary metadata. This jeopardizes interoperability and consequently raises barriers to the successful achievement of augmented and transparent use of multimedia resources. In this context, we have investigated and evaluated the interoperability at the semantic level of Digital Items throughout the automated production, delivery and consumption of complex multimedia resources in heterogeneous environments. This paper describes the studies conducted, the experiments performed, and the conclusions reached towards that goal.

Full reference

Christian Timmerer, Maria Teresa Andrade, Pedro Carvalho, Davide Rogai, and Giovanni Cordara, "The Semantics of MPEG-21 Digital Items Revisited", Proceedings of ACM Multimedia 2008 2nd International Workshop on the Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics, Vancouver, Canada, October 27 - November 1, 2008.