ECS researchers win prestigious awards at ACM Multimedia conference

Prestigious prizes for Best Open-Source Software were awarded to ECS researchers Dr Jonathon Hare and Dr Sina Samangooei at the ACM Multimedia 2011 conference, held this month in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Dr Hare and Dr Samangooei, of the Web and Internet Science research group in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, presented two open-source packages in the competition, both of which were developed in the University. OpenIMAJ and Image Terrier beat the other 26 entries, and Dr Samangooei was awarded the Social Media Award for his enthusiastic use of Twitter throughout the Conference event!

OpenIMAJ is a general-purpose multimedia content analysis library written in the Java programming language. It is the result of a number of past and present research projects within ECS and contains state-of-the-art analysis algorithms and techniques developed by the Southampton team.

ImageTerrier is a scalable content-based image retrieval system, built on top of the Terrier text retrieval testbed, developed by the University of Glasgow. It is possible, using OpenIMAJ and ImageTerrier, to create retrieval systems akin to Google Goggles.

The current development of the software is funded by the European Union under the FP7 projects LivingKnowledge and ARCOMEM, together with the LiveMemories project funded by the Autonomous Province of Trentino.

This work has been supervised over recent years by Professor Paul Lewis and Dr Kirk Martinez of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science.