Browsing is a way of finding documents in a large amount of data which is complementary to querying and which is particularly suitable for multimedia documents. Locating particular documents in a very large collection of multimedia documents such as the ones available in peer to peer networks is a difficult task. However, current peer to peer systems do not allow to do this by browsing. In this report, we show how one can build a peer to peer system supporting a kind of browsing. In our proposal, one must extend an existing distributed hash table system with a few features : handling partial hashkeys and providing appropriate routing mechanisms for these hash-keys. We give such an algorithm for the particular case of the Tapestry distributed hash table. This is a work in progress as no proper validation has been done yet.
The work of Loisant @cite_6 @cite_3 is a good representative of the state of the art in multimedia browsing systems. It is based on a clustering of the documents that is done before the browsing process. This pre-analysis allows to build classes which are more relevant than the ones we use. However, in order to build that clustering, the system needs to have access to all the descriptors. For this reason, that system cannot be easily used in a peer to peer framework. Moreover, when new documents are added to the system, the clustering may have to be modified, which raises new difficulties. Another difficulty in using such a system is the mapping between clusters and logical addresses. In our system this mapping is canonical. With dynamical or ad hoc clusters, another DHT layer would be necessary to make the translation.
@cite_3 @cite_6
2526145926 137863291 1505083828 2623510711
Visual search and image retrieval underpin numerous applications, however the task is still challenging predominantly due to the variability of object appearance and ever increasing size of the databases, often exceeding billions of images. Prior art methods rely on aggregation of local scale-invariant descriptors, such as SIFT, via mechanisms including Bag of Visual Words (BoW), Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) and Fisher Vectors (FV). However, their performance is still short of what is required. This paper presents a novel method for deriving a compact and distinctive representation of image content called Robust Visual Descriptor with Whitening (RVD-W). It significantly advances the state of the art and delivers world-class performance. In our approach local descriptors are rank-assigned to multiple clusters. Residual vectors are then computed in each cluster, normalized using a direction-preserving normalization function and aggregated based on the neighborhood rank. Importantly, the residual vectors are de-correlated and whitened in each cluster before aggregation, leading to a balanced energy distribution in each dimension and significantly improved performance. We also propose a new post-PCA normalization approach which improves separability between the matching and non-matching global descriptors. This new normalization benefits not only our RVD-W descriptor but also improves existing approaches based on FV and VLAD aggregation. Furthermore, we show that the aggregation framework developed using hand-crafted SIFT features also performs exceptionally well with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based features. The RVD-W pipeline outperforms state-of-the-art global descriptors on both the Holidays and Oxford datasets. On the large scale datasets, Holidays1M and Oxford1M, SIFT-based RVD-W representation obtains a mAP of 45.1 and 35.1 percent, while CNN-based RVD-W achieve a mAP of 63.5 and 44.8 percent, all yielding superior performance to the state-of-the-art. Many real-world domains can be represented as large node-link graphs: backbone Internet routers connect with 70,000 other hosts, mid-sized Web servers handle between 20,000 and 200,000 hyperlinked documents, and dictionaries contain millions of words defined in terms of each other. Computational manipulation of such large graphs is common, but previous tools for graph visualization have been limited to datasets of a few thousand nodes. Visual depictions of graphs and networks are external representations that exploit human visual processing to reduce the cognitive load of many tasks that require understanding of global or local structure. We assert that the two key advantages of computer-based systems for information visualization over traditional paper-based visual exposition are interactivity and scalability. We also argue that designing visualization software by taking the characteristics of a target user's task domain into account leads to systems that are more effective and scale to larger datasets than previous work. This thesis contains a detailed analysis of three specialized systems for the interactive exploration of large graphs, relating the intended tasks to the spatial layout and visual encoding choices. We present two novel algorithms for specialized layout and drawing that use quite different visual metaphors. The H3 system for visualizing the hyperlink structures of web sites scales to datasets of over 100,000 nodes by using a carefully chosen spanning tree as the layout backbone, 3D hyperbolic geometry for a Focus+Context view, and provides a fluid interactive experience through guaranteed frame rate drawing. The Constellation system features a highly specialized 2D layout intended to spatially encode domain-specific information for computational linguists checking the plausibility of a large semantic network created from dictionaries. The Planet Multicast system for displaying the tunnel topology of the Internet's multicast backbone provides a literal 3D geographic layout of arcs on a globe to help MBone maintainers find misconfigured long-distance tunnels. Each of these three systems provides a very different view of the graph structure, and we evaluate their efficacy for the intended task. We generalize these findings in our analysis of the importance of interactivity and specialization for graph visualization systems that are effective and scalable. This thesis describes a novel statistical named-entity (i.e. “proper name”) recognition system known as “MENE” (Maximum Entropy Named Entity). Named entity (N.E.) recognition is a form of information extraction in which we seek to classify every word in a document as being a person-name, organization, location, date, time, monetary value, percentage, or “none of the above”. The task has particular significance for Internet search engines, machine translation, the automatic indexing of documents, and as a foundation for work on more complex information extraction tasks. Two of the most significant problems facing the constructor of a named entity system are the questions of portability and system performance. A practical N.E. system will need to be ported frequently to new bodies of text and even to new languages. The challenge is to build a system which can be ported with minimal expense (in particular minimal programming by a computational linguist) while maintaining a high degree of accuracy in the new domains or languages. MENE attempts to address these issues through the use of maximum entropy probabilistic modeling. It utilizes a very flexible object-based architecture which allows it to make use of a broad range of knowledge sources in making its tagging decisions. In the DARPA-sponsored MUC-7 named entity evaluation, the system displayed an accuracy rate which was well-above the median, demonstrating that it can achieve the performance goal. In addition, we demonstrate that the system can be used as a post-processing tool to enhance the output of a hand-coded named entity recognizer through experiments in which MENE improved on the performance of N.E. systems from three different sites. Furthermore, when all three external recognizers are combined under MENE, we are able to achieve very strong results which, in some cases, appear to be competitive with human performance. Finally, we demonstrate the trans-lingual portability of the system. We ported the system to two Japanese-language named entity tasks, one of which involved a new named entity category, “artifact”. Our results on these tasks were competitive with the best systems built by native Japanese speakers despite the fact that the author speaks no Japanese. In this paper, we propose a novel appearance-based approach for topological mapping based on a hierarchical decomposition of the environment. In our map, images with similar visual properties are grouped together in nodes, which are represented by means of an average global descriptor and an index of binary features based on a bag-of-words online approach. Each image is represented by means of a global descriptor and a set of local features, and this information is used in a two-level loop closure approach, where first global descriptors are employed to obtain the most likely nodes of the map and then binary image features are used to retrieve the most likely images inside these nodes. This hierarchical scheme enables us to reduce the search space when recognizing places, maintaining high accuracy when creating a map. Our approach is validated using several public datasets and compared against several state-of-the-art techniques. The accuracy and the sparsity of the generated maps are also discussed.