Multimedia Information Systems (MMIS)

We at ITEC strongly believe that multimedia content creation, retrieval, sharing and processing offer great research challenges and research in this area is beneficial to cultural and technology development of our society.

More specifically, we focus our research on

  • Interactive multimedia search and retrieval
  • Multimedia analytics
  • Medical multimedia information systems
  • Multimedia indexing and retrieval
  • User-centered multimedia and multimedia experience

One of our main research topics is medical multimedia information systems, where we investigate novel methods to automatically analyze the content of medical videos (from endoscopic inspections/surgeries, or microscopic surgeries) and use analysis results to build up an information retrieval system for a medical video database. This includes automatic filtering of relevant content, effective domain-specific compression of video data, automatic content indexing and detection of semantics, such as anatomical structures, instruments, surgical actions, and surgical errors, as well as the investigation of efficient and appropriate interfaces to provide browsing and searching (i.e., content-based retrieval) in the underlying video data. Relevant research projects in this field are: EndoVIP, EndoVIP2, CODE-MM, and KISMET. More details on our research on medical multimedia information systems can be found here.

Another important topic is interactive video retrieval (for videos in general), where we investigate novel interfaces and approaches to improve content-based search in large video archives. For that effort, we organize an annual international video retrieval competition since 2012, called the Video Browser Showdown. There we evaluate video retrieval systems developed by international researchers in the field of multimedia, which compete in solving Known-Item Search (KIS) as well as Ad-Hoc Video Search (AVS) tasks as quickly as possible for a shared video dataset. For the last three years we used the IAAC.3 dataset for that purpose, consisting of 4.593 Internet Archive videos, covering 600h of video content, in collaboration with NIST/TRECVID, which also provided challenging AVS tasks.

ITEC also has a strong track record in visual information retrieval including local and global visual features, temporal features for video retrieval and lately deep learning for visual information retrieval. The popular open source software libraries Lire and LireSolr are just two examples of successful research to application projects. We also consider multimedia not independent from users and investigate user intentions and user goals in context of multimedia consumption and retrieval systems, i.e., by investigating relevance of search results in comparison to the question why people actually triggered a search. In this context we also organize tracks at MultimediaEval on a regular basis.

  • Mathias Lux

    Assoc.-Prof. DI Dr. Mathias Lux

    Associate Professor

  • Assoc.-Prof. DI Dr. Klaus Schöffmann

    Associate Professor & Deputy head of the department

  • Mario Taschwer

    Mag. Dr. Mario Taschwer

    System Administrator

  • Rudolf Messner

    System Administrator

  • Martina Steinbacher

    Martina Steinbacher

    Secretary

  • Margit Letter

    Margit Letter, BA

    Secretary

  • Dr. Felix Schniz

    Project Assistant & SPL Game Studies & Engineering

  • Anna Gliesche

    Secretary

  • Paul Kowatsch

    Student Research Assistant

  • Martin Rader

    Student Research Assistant

  • Mario Leopold

    Student Research Assistant

  • Sebastian Uitz, MSc

    Project Assistant

  • Sahar Nasiri Haghighi, MSc

    Project Assistant

  • Magdalena Strobl

    GSE assistant

  • Kseniia Harshina, MSc

    Project Assistant

  • Klaus Volk

    Student Research Assistant

Mathias Lux

Assoc.-Prof. DI Dr. Mathias Lux

Associate Professor

Room: S.2.59

Projects: Automatisierte Generierung von Unternehmenslogos (FFG), Entwicklung einer Applikation für Mobiltelefone (FFG), CodeMM, Echtzeitnahe multimediale Visualisierung bei Simulationen an Fahrzeugprüfständen.

Assoc.-Prof. DI Dr. Klaus Schöffmann

Associate Professor & Deputy head of the department

Room: S.2.58

Projects: OVID, SQUASH, CodeAbility

Mario Taschwer

Mag. Dr. Mario Taschwer

System Administrator

Room: S.2.52

Projects: OVID

Rudolf Messner

System Administrator

Room: 2.41a

Martina Steinbacher

Martina Steinbacher

Secretary

Room: S.2.61

Projects: ARTICONF

Margit Letter

Margit Letter, BA

Secretary

Room: S.2.61

Dr. Felix Schniz

Project Assistant & SPL Game Studies & Engineering

Room: S.1.41

Project: 5G Playground

Anna Gliesche

Secretary

Room: S.2.52

Paul Kowatsch

Student Research Assistant

Room: S.2.49

Project: CodeAbility

Martin Rader

Student Research Assistant

Room: S.1.41

Mario Leopold

Student Research Assistant

Room: S.1.41

Sebastian Uitz, MSc

Project Assistant

Project: A Webbing Journey, Kärntner Fog, Virtual Reality for Healthy Youth

Room: S.2.48a

Sahar Nasiri Haghighi, MSc

Project Assistant

Room: S.2.49

Project: SQUASH

Magdalena Strobl

GSE assistant

Room: S.1.41

Kseniia Harshina, MSc

Project Assistant

Room: S.1.41

Ada Lovelace Project

Klaus Volk

Student Research Assistant

Room: S.2.49

Projects: CodeAbility

Ongoing Projects

We actively participate in numerous international and national research projects, ranging from basic research to application-oriented projects and direct cooperation with industry, such as:

  • SQUASH – Surgical Quality Assessment in Gynecologic Laparoscopy
  • OVID – Relevance Detection in Ophthalmic Surgery Videos
  • OCTOPUS
  • CodeAbility Austria – digitally supported programming education at Austrian Universities

Completed Projects

We gained our expertise due to actively participation in numerous international and national research projects, ranging from basic research to application-oriented projects and direct cooperation with industry, such as

  • KISMET – Knowledge & Information Sharing in Medical Expert Teams
  • ENDOVIP2 – Endoscopic video processing
  • CROSMOS – Cooperation, Resource-Optimization an Self-Orgenization in Mobile, Mixed-Reality Environments
  • CODEMM – Community of Domain Experts in Medical Multimedia
  • NGVB – Next-Generation Video Browsing