Multimedia Digital Libraries

New Paradigms for Browsing & Search

The overall aim of the project is to facilitate visual and text-based access approaches to digital libraries through novel browsing, search and visualisation paradigms in additional to the traditional text search approach.

Project interactive approaches will focus on general users with a straightforward retrieval paradigm that requires the minumum of retrieval effort from the user. As the majority of text searches are composed of 2-3 keywords this is an important consideration.

The digital content used in the project is composed of television news, newspaper archives, museum photos and personal digital photos. Material is supplied by the British library, the Victoria & Albert Museum, BBC, University of Waikato and Imperial College London.

<strong>Project Objectives</strong>

<ul>

<li>Develop a query-by-example mode using automated content-based analysis which ultimately extracts salient visual and textual features from the multimedia objects and creates according indices</li>

<li>Explore new browsing paradigms which make use of above similarity indices</li>

<li>Devise new search paradigms based on lateral browsing</li>

<li>Present and summarise results adequately through document clustering; automated natural language summarisation of text and speech; story board generation of video material</li>

<li>Define new interfaces which integrate and synchronise the different modi for resource discovery in digital libraries</li>

</ul>

The project will showcase novel search and browsing engines allowing to search multimedia collections by alternative ways, eg, image similarity, as well as textual metadata which may or may not be present.