Abstract

In this thesis we present a complete image retrieval system based on topic models and evaluate the suitability of different types of topic models for the task of large-scale retrieval on realworld databases. Different similarity measure are evaluated in a retrieval-by-example task.Next, we focus on the incorporation of different types of local image features in the topic models. For this, we first evaluate which types of feature detectors and descriptors are appropriate to model the images, then we propose and explore models that fuse multiple types of local features. All basic topic models require the quantization of the otherwise high-dimensional continuous local feature vectors into a finite, discrete vocabulary to enable the bag-of-words image representation the topic models are built on. As it is not clear how to optimally quantize the high-dimensional features, we introduce different extensions to a basic topic model which model the visual vocabulary continuously, making the quantization step obsolete.On-line image repositories of the Web 2.0 often store additional information about the images besides their pixel values, called metadata, such as associated tags, date of creation, ownership and camera parameters. In this work we also investigate how to include such cues in our retrieval system. We present work in progress on (hierarchical) models which fuse features from multiple modalities.Finally, we present an approach to find the most relevant images, i.e., very representative images, in a large web-scale collection given a query term. Our unsupervised approach ranks highest the image whose image content and its various metadata types gives us the highest probability according to a the model we automatically build for this tag.

No abstract

One type of Internet services that have recently gained much attention are services that enable people around the world to communicate in real-time. Such services of real-time interaction are offered by applications most commonly referred to as distributed interactive applications. Concrete examples of distributed interactive applications are multiplayer online games, audio/video conferencing, and many virtual-reality applications linked to education, entertainment, military, etc. A time-dependent requirement generally applies to all distributed interactive applications that aim to support real-time interaction, and is usually in terms of a few hundred milliseconds. The latency requirements are manifested in terms of event-distribution, group membership management, group dynamics, etc., far exceeding the requirements of many other applications.