Consumer-grade drones have become effective multimedia collection tools, spring-boarded by rapid development in embedded CPUs, GPUs, and cameras. They are best known for their ability to cheaply collect high-quality aerial video, 3D terrain scans, infrared imagery, etc., with respect to manned aircraft. However, users can also create and attach custom sensors, actuators, or computers, so the drone can collect different data, generate composite data, or interact intelligently with its environment, e.g., autonomously changing behavior to land in a safe way, or choosing further data collection sites. Unfortunately, developing custom payloads is prohibitively difficult for many researchers outside of engineering. We provide guidelines for how to create a sophisticated computational payload that integrates a Raspberry Pi 5 into a DJI Matrice 350. The payload fits into the Matrice's case like a typical DJI payload (but is much cheaper), is easy to build and expand (3D-printed), uses the drone's power and telemetry, can control the drone and its other payloads, can access the drone's sensors and camera feeds, and can process video and stream it to the operator via the controller in real time. We describe the difficulties and proprietary quirks we encountered, how we worked through them, and provide setup scripts and a known-working configuration for others to use.

Different task interpretations are a highly undesired element in interactive video retrieval evaluations. When a participating team focuses partially on a wrong goal, the evaluation results might become partially misleading. In this paper, we propose a process for refining known-item and open-set type queries, and preparing the assessors that judge the correctness of submissions to open-set queries. Our findings from recent years reveal that a proper methodology can lead to objective query quality improvements and subjective participant satisfaction with query clarity.

In this demonstration, we present Exquisitor, a media explorer capable of learning user preferences in real-time during interactions with the 99.2 million images of YFCC100M. Exquisitor owes its efficiency to innovations in data representation, compression, and indexing. Exquisitor can complete each interaction round, including learning preferences and presenting the most relevant results, in less than 30 ms using only a single CPU core and modest RAM. In short, Exquisitor can bring large-scale interactive learning to standard desktops and laptops, and even high-end mobile devices.

A vast number of algorithms and methods are proposed and developed every year in the domain of indexing and searching multimedia documents. Much of this work results in published papers and some sources are made openly available, but rarely will you find a fully working end-to-end system that has been pre-installed, configured, and is ready-to-go on a virtual machine available for download. In this paper we present such a system, the DeCPLive web interface, that is built on top of the distributed, high-throughput, content-based image retrieval algorithm DeCP The virtual machine is ready-to-go as on it we have pre-installed services, indexed openly available datasets, binaries for DeCP and DeCPLive as well as the source code.

The world has experienced phenomenal growth in data production and storage in recent years, much of which has taken the form of media files. At the same time, computing power has become abundant with multi-core machines, grids, and clouds. Yet it remains a challenge to harness the available power and move toward gracefully searching and retrieving from web-scale media collections. Several researchers have experimented with using automatically distributed computing frameworks, notably Hadoop and Spark, for processing multimedia material, but mostly using small collections on small computing clusters. In this article, we describe a prototype of a (near) web-scale throughput-oriented MM retrieval service using the Spark framework running on the AWS cloud service. We present retrieval results using up to 43 billion SIFT feature vectors from the public YFCC 100M collection, making this the largest high-dimensional feature vector collection reported in the literature. We also present a publicly available demonstration retrieval system, running on our own servers, where the implementation of the Spark pipelines can be observed in practice using standard image benchmarks, and downloaded for research purposes. Finally, we describe a method to evaluate retrieval quality of the ever-growing high-dimensional index of the prototype, without actually indexing a web-scale media collection.

Computing power has now become abundant with multi-core machines, grids and clouds, but it remains a challenge to harness the available power and move towards gracefully handling web-scale datasets. Several researchers have used automatically distributed computing frameworks, notably Hadoop and Spark, for processing multimedia material, but mostly using small collections on small clusters. In this paper, we describe the engineering process for a prototype of a (near) web-scale multimedia service using the Spark framework running on the AWS cloud service. We present experimental results using up to 43 billion SIFT feature vectors from the public YFCC 100M collection, making this the largest high-dimensional feature vector collection reported in the literature. The design of the prototype and performance results demonstrate both the flexibility and scalability of the Spark framework for implementing multimedia services.

While the past decade has witnessed an unprecedented growth of data generated and collected all over the world, existing data management approaches lack the ability to address the challenges of Big Data. One of the most promising tools for Big Data processing is the MapReduce paradigm. Although it has its limitations, the MapReduce programming model has laid the foundations for answering some of the Big Data challenges. In this paper, we focus on Hadoop, the open-source implementation of the MapReduce paradigm. Using as case-study a Hadoop-based application, i.e., image similarity search, we present our experiences with the Hadoop framework when processing terabytes of data. The scale of the data and the application workload allowed us to test the limits of Hadoop and the efficiency of the tools it provides. We present a wide collection of experiments and the practical lessons we have drawn from our experience with the Hadoop environment. Our findings can be shared as best practices and recommendations to the Big Data researchers and practioners.

Most researchers working on high-dimensional indexing agree on the following three trends: (i) the size of the multimedia collections to index are now reaching millions if not billions of items, (ii) the computers we use every day now come with multiple cores and (iii) hardware becomes more available, thanks to easier access to Grids and/or Clouds. This paper shows how the Map-Reduce paradigm can be applied to indexing algorithms and demonstrates that great scalability can be achieved using Hadoop, a popular Map-Reduce-based framework. Dramatic performance improvements are not however guaranteed a priori: such frameworks are rigid, they severely constrain the possible access patterns to data and scares resource RAM has to be shared. Furthermore, algorithms require major redesign, and may have to settle for sub-optimal behavior. The benefits, however, are many: simplicity for programmers, automatic distribution, fault tolerance, failure detection and automatic re-runs and, last but not least, scalability. We share our experience of adapting a clustering-based high-dimensional indexing algorithm to the Map-Reduce model, and of testing it at large scale with Hadoop as we index 30 billion SIFT descriptors. We foresee that lessons drawn from our work could minimize time, effort and energy invested by other researchers and practitioners working in similar directions.