ImageCLEF 2013 Scalable Concept Image Annotation – Call for participation

ImageCLEF 2013 Scalable Concept Image Annotation – Call for participation http://imageclef.org/2013/photo/annotation

We cordially invite you to participate in this year’s Scalable Concept Image Annotation challenge, one of the subtasks of ImageCLEF (http://imageclef.org/2013). ImageCLEF is one of the labs of CLEF 2013 (http://clef2013.org), which this year will be held in Valencia, Spain.

The challenge addresses the problem of automatically annotating a (possibly very large) database of images, an important process in order to reliably index and later retrieve images from this database. Image concept detection generally has relied on training data that has been manually, and thus reliably annotated – an expensive and laborious endeavor that cannot easily scale, especially when the number of concepts grows. To address this issue, this task proposes to develop annotation systems by relying only on automatically obtained web data. The text surrounding the images in webpages frequently has relation to the content of the images, making it a useful, albeit very noisy, source of data.
The participants need to develop a system using only a provided training set of images and associated text, and optionally other resources that do not require labeling, e.g. more unlabeled images, WordNet, dictionaries, etc. Participating can be as simple as naively using the text data to define the presence or absence of concepts and then use an already existing supervised-based method, so we encourage you all to take part in the task.

The participants will have a chance to submit a paper describing their system, which will be published in the CLEF Labs Working Notes.
Furthermore, the groups of the best performing systems will be invited to give an oral presentation at CLEF 2013.

For more details on the task please visit http://imageclef.org/2013/photo/annotation

Schedule:
15/12/2012: Registration opens
07/01/2013: Training and Development sets available
07/01/2013: Development set baseline toolkit available
15/03/2013: Test set available
15/04/2013 — 22/04/2013: Submission system for runs is open
25/05/2013: Submissions results released
15/06/2013: Deadline for submission of working notes papers
23/09/2013 — 26/09/2013: CLEF 2013 Conference, Valencia, Spain

Organizers:
* Mauricio Villegas, PRHLT, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain, mvillegas@iti.upv.es
* Roberto Paredes, PRHLT, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain, rparedes@dsic.upv.es
* Bart Thomee, Yahoo! Research, Spain, bthomee@yahoo-inc.com