Medical Multimedia Information Systems

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ITEC Organized the 14th International Video Retrieval Competition and Scored Well

On January 8th, 2025, the 14th Video Browser Showdown (VBS) took place at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM2025), in Nara, Japan. 17 international teams competed against each other over about five hours and solved very challenging tasks. VBS is the largest international video retrieval competition and teams had to perform search in a dataset with a total of 31.715 video files and 5.930 hours, coming from the V3C, LHE, and MVK video collections. This year, in addition to the typical task types, such as KIS-V/KIS-T (known-item search with visual and textual hints), AVS (ad-hoc video search) and QA (interactive question answering), we had a new category called KIS-C (conversational known-item search), where an oracle of a few people mentioned hints and answered questions to the teams about the scene of interest. Overall, VBS2025 was a challenging and fascinating event, with a lot of fun, exciting queries, and great video retrieval systems.

We would like to thank the 17 teams with 95 unique authors from 13 countries for their participation and congratulate them to the great success at VBS2025. Congratulations in particular go to
– the NII-UIT team, who was the overall winner and provided the best expert system
– the VEAGLE team, who provided the best novice system

Also ITEC’s video retrieval system, diveXplore, performed very well and achieved the 3rd place in the overall scoring.

VBS is a huge event that requires a lot of organization efforts.
Many thanks go to Werner Bailer for creating and checking all the queries in advance, to Cathal Gurrin for doing an amazing job at moderation over 5 hours, to all the live judges (Dimitris Georgalis, Gylfi Þór Guðmundsson, Björn Þór Jónsson, Andreas Leibetseder, Laura Rettig, Heiko Schuldt, Dimitris Stefanopoulos) for assessing submissions that could not be evaluated automatically, the oracle members (Björn Þór Jónsson, Stevan Rudinac, Heiko Schuldt) for exciting query hints, the developers of the distributed retrieval evaluation servery (DRES) (Luca Rossetto, Loris Sauter, Ralph Gasser), the creators of the datasets (particularly Luca Rossetto and Sai-Kit Yeung), and all the local organizers of MMM2025 (Ichiro Ide, Ioannis Kompatsiaris, ChangSheng Xu, Keiji Yanai, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shin’ichi Satoh, Marc Kastner, and others). THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!

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“Final Countdown” Theme Sparks Creative Innovation at Klagenfurt Game Jam”

A remarkable display of game development talent unfolded at the University of Klagenfurt as 64 participants created 16 unique games during the intensive Klagenfurt GSE Jam, held December 13-15, 2024. The event, which welcomed in-person and online participants, challenged developers to create games around the theme “Final Countdown,” resulting in an impressive array of interpretations.

The event commenced with opening remarks from Wilfried Elmenreich and Felix Schniz, launching participants into 48 hours of intensive development. While anchored in the University’s Game Studies and Engineering master program, the jam welcomed developers of all backgrounds, creating a dynamic environment for creative collaboration. Organizers Armin Lippitz, Bodo Thausing, and Tom Tucek structured the event to maximize creative potential while maintaining a supportive atmosphere.

The diversity of submitted games demonstrated remarkable creativity, with developers crafting experiences ranging from intense action games to atmospheric adventures and narrative-driven experiences. Many teams embraced additional challenges known as diversifiers, including “Unconventional Controls,” “Minimalist Style,” and “Unusual Perspectives,” adding extra layers of complexity to their projects. The resulting games were evaluated across multiple categories, including Most Fun Game, Best Art, Best Audio, Best Writing, and Best Use of Theme, ensuring recognition for excellence across all aspects of game development.

Competition was fierce this year, with numerous standout titles demonstrating the participants’ ability to blend innovative gameplay mechanics with creative interpretations of the countdown theme. The event culminated in a game fair showcasing all sixteen titles, highlighting the remarkable achievements possible within a 48-hour development window.

All games from the Klagenfurt GSE Jam are available to play at https://itch.io/jam/klagenfurt-gse-jam-ws24/entries

Mathias Lux
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First Game Creators Barcamp Held at the University of Klagenfurt

Local game developers and researchers gathered for the inaugural Game Creators Barcamp on Friday, December 6th, at the University of Klagenfurt. The event featured discussions on game development, educational technologies, and industry funding opportunities.

The first Barcamp drew a small but engaged group of participants who explored various game design and development topics. Discussions covered diverse areas, including the story behind the game Electric Alps, potential improvements in language learning through gamification, particularly for teaching irregular German verbs, and an examination of game theory in puzzle game design. The attendees also provided an overview of funding schemes available for game studios. Plans are underway for the next Barcamp, scheduled for spring, hoping to increase participant numbers.

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Magdalena Strobl @ “Game Over?” – Conference, Salzburg

Magdalena participated in the “Game Over?”- Conference from November 14th to 16th with its topic “Dystopia x Utopia x Video Games.” Together with Iris van der Horst (MEd), she presented the talk titled “From Oppression to Liberation: Postcolonial Perspectives on the Dystopian World of Xenoblade Chronicles 3” focused on how the game displays a critical dystopia variant 1 and how it criticizes colonial structures by magnifying the abstract concepts of third space and contact zone and depicting them in a very concrete and creative way. Therefore, this presentation combined theories on utopianism and postcolonialism.

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Klaus Schöffmann gave a Keynote Talk about “The Use of AI in Image and Video Retrieval Over the last Decade” at the MVRMLM 2024 Workshop, co-located with ACM ICMR 2024

Together with Cathal Gurrin from DCU, Ireland, on June 14, 2024, Klaus Schöffmann gave a keynote talk about “From Concepts to Embeddings. Charting the Use of AI in Digital Video and Lifelog Search Over the Last Decade” at the International Workshop on Multimodal Video Retrieval and Multimodal Language Modelling (MVRMLM’24), co-located with the ACM ICMR 2024 conference in Phuket, Thailand.

Link: https://mvrmlm2024.ecit.qub.ac.uk

Here is the abstract of the talk:

In the past decade, the field of interactive multimedia retrieval has undergone a transformative evolution driven by the advances in artificial intelligence (AI). This keynote talk will explore the journey from early concept-based retrieval systems to the sophisticated embedding-based techniques that dominate the landscape today. By examining the progression of such AI-driven approaches at both the VBS (Video Browser Showdown) and the LSC (Lifelog Search Challenge), we will highlight the pivotal role of comparative benchmarking in accelerating innovation and establishing performance standards. We will also forward at the potential future developments in interactive multimedia retrieval benchmarking, including emerging trends, the integration of multimodal data, and the future comparative benchmarking challenges within our community.

 

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ITEC Wins Lifelog Search Challenge 2024 (LSC 2024) Again!

On June 10, 2024, the 7th Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC 2024), an international competition on lifelog retrieval took place as a workshop at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR 2024) in Phuket, Thailand. The LSC is organized by a large international team (Cathal Gurrin, Björn Þór Jónsson, Duc-Tien Dang-Nguyen, Jakub Lokoc, Klaus Schoeffmann, Minh-Triet Tran, Steve Hodges, Graham Healy, Luca Rossetto, and Werner Bailer) and attracted 21 teams from all around the world (Austria, Czechia, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, and Vietnam). The competition tests how fast and accurate state-of-the-art lifelog retrieval systems can solve search tasks (known-item search, ad-hoc search, visual question answering) in a shared dataset of about 720000 images, collected by an anonymous  lifelogger over 18 months. With the LIFEXPLORE system developed by Martin Rader, Mario Leopold, and Klaus Schöffmann, ITEC could win this competition for the second time in a row and was awarded for the Best LSC System. Congratulations!

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ACM ICMR 2024 Successfully Concluded, co-organized by ITEC

From June 10, 2024 until June 14, 2024, the ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR 2024) took place in Phuket, Thailand. It was organized by Cathal Gurrin (DCU), Klaus Schoeffmann (ITEC, AAU), and Rachada Kongkachandra (Thammasat University). ICMR 2024 received 348 paper submissions and about 80 more to the nine co-located workshops (LSC’24, AI-SIPM’24, MORE’24, ICDAR’24, MAD’24, AIQAM’24, MUWS’24, R2B’24, and MVRMLM’24). The conference attracted about 202 on-site participants (including local organizers), with 10 oral sessions, an on-site and a virtual poster session, a demo session, a reproducibility session, two interesting keynotes about Multimodal Retrieval in Computer Vision (Mubarak Shah) and AI-Based Video Analytics (Supavadee Aramvith), a panel about LLM and Multimedia (Alan Smeaton), and four interesting tutorials.

Link: www.icmr2024.org

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ITEC Video Retrieval System Awarded at International Video Search Challenge

The diveXplore video retrieval system, by Klaus Schoeffmann and Sahar Nasirihaghighi, was awarded as the best ‘Video Question-Answering-Tool for Novices’ at the 13th Video Browser Showdown (VBS 2024), which is an international video search challenge annually held at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM 2024), which took place this year in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. VBS 2024 was a 6-hours long challenge with many search tasks of different types (known-item search/KIS, ad-hoc video search/AVS, question-answering/QA) in three different datasets, amounting for about 2500 hours of video content, some performed by experts and others by novices recruited from the conference audience.

diveXplore teaser:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlt7w0pYWYE

diveXplore demo paper:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-53302-0_34

VBS info:

https://videobrowsershowdown.org/

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13th Video Browser Showdown (VBS 2024) held in Amsterdam with 12 International Teams

The 13th Video Browser Showdown (VBS 2024) was held on 29th January, 2024, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM 2024). 12 international teams (from Austria, China, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Singapore, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Vietnam) competed over about 6 hours for quickly and accurately solving many search tasks of different types (known-item search/KIS, ad-hoc-video search/AVS, question-answering/QA) in three datasets with about 2500 hours of video content. Like in previous years, this large-scale international video retrieval challenge was an exciting event that demonstrated the state-of-the-art performance of interactive video retrieval systems.

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Klaus Schöffmann received BEST KIS-VISUAL award for IVR4B at CBMI2023

The Interactive Video Retrieval for Beginners (IVR4B) special session and competition took place on September 21, 2023, at the International Conference on Multimedia Indexing (CBMI2023) in Orleans, France. https://cbmi2023.org/

We are happy to announce that Klaus Schoeffmann could save the BEST KIS-VISUAL award for this competition, with his interactive video search system diveXplore.