Mining Geotagged Photos for Semantic Understanding

Speaker: Dr. Jiebo Luo, IEEE Fellow, Senior Principal Scientist at the Kodak Research Laboratories.

Time: Monday 15 December 2008, 10:30 am - 11:30 am Venue: SCE Meeting Room

Abstract: Semantic understanding based only on vision cues has been a challenging problem. This problem is particularly acute when the application domain is unconstrained photos available on the Internet or in personal repositories. In recent years, it has been shown that metadata captured with pictures can provide valuable contextual cues complementary to the image content and can be used to improve classification performance. With the recent geotagging phenomenon, an important piece of metadata available with many geotagged pictures is GPS information. We will describe a number of novel ways to mine GPS information in a powerful contextual inference framework that boosts the accuracy of semantic understanding. With integrated GPS-capable cameras on the horizon and geotagging on the rise, this line of research will revolutionize event recognition and media annotation.

Speaker Bio: Jiebo Luo is a Senior Principal Scientist with the Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, NY. He received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1989, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester in 1995. His research interests include signal and image processing, pattern recognition, computer vision, and the related multi-disciplines such as multimedia mining, biomedical imaging, computational photography, and human-computer interaction. Dr. Luo has authored over 130 technical papers and holds nearly 50 granted US patents.

Dr. Luo actively participates in numerous technical conferences, including serving as the chair of the 2008 ACM International Conference on Content-based Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR), an area chair of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), a program co-chair of the 2007 SPIE International Symposium on Visual Communication and Image Processing (VCIP), a member of the Organizing Committee of the 2008 ACM Multimedia Conference, 2008/2006 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) and 2002 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), and the founding chair of the International Workshop on Semantic Learning Application in Multimedia (SLAM). He is the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Multimedia (Academy Publisher). Currently, he is also on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), Pattern Recognition (PR), and Journal of Electronic Imaging (JEI). He is a guest editor for a number of influential special issues, including “Image Understanding for Digital Photos” (PR, 2005), “Real-World Image Annotation and Retrieval” (TPAMI, 2008), “Integration of Content and Context for Multimedia Management” (TMM, 2008), “Event Analysis in Video” (IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2009), and “Probabilistic Graphic Models in Computer Vision” (TPAMI, 2009). Dr. Luo is an adjunct professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, as well as the co-advisor or thesis committee member of many PhD and MS graduate students in various universities. He is a Kodak Distinguished Inventor, a Fellow of SPIE for achievements in electronic imaging and visual communication, and a Fellow of IEEE for contributions to semantic image understanding and intelligent image processing.