Call for Participation
MediaEval 2012 Multimedia Benchmark Evaluation
http://www.multimediaeval.org
Please register by 31 May 2012
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MediaEval is a multimedia benchmark evaluation that offers tasks promoting research and innovation in areas related to human and social aspects of multimedia. MediaEval 2012 focuses on aspects of multimedia including and going beyond visual content, including speech, language, audio and social factors. Participants carry out one or more of the tasks offered and submit runs to be evaluated. They then write up their results and present them at the MediaEval 2012 workshop.

For each task, participants receive a task definition, task data and accompanying resources (dependent on task) such as shot boundaries, keyframes, visual features, speech transcripts and social metadata. In order to encourage participants to develop techniques that push forward the state-of-the-art, a 'required reading' list of papers will be provided for each task. Participation is open to all interested research groups. Please sign up via http://www.multimediaeval.org (regular sign up will remain open until 31 May).

The following tasks are available to participants at MediaEval 2012:

Placing Task
This task involves automatically assigning geo-coordinates to Flickr videos using one or more of: Flickr metadata, visual content, audio content, social information (Data: Creative Commons Flickr data, predominantly English language, extended from the 2011 data set.)

Social Event Detection Task
This task requires participants to discover events and detect media items that are related to either a specific social event or an event-class of interest. By social events we mean that the events are planned by people, attended by people and that the social media are captured by people. (Data: URLs of images and videos available on Flickr and other internet archives together with metadata).

Spoken Web Search Task
This task involves searching FOR audio content WITHIN audio content USING an audio content query. It is particularly interesting for speech researchers in the area of spoken term detection. (Data: Audio from four different Indian languages and four South African languages. Each of the ca. 2000 data item is an 8 KHz audio file 4-30 secs in length.)

Tagging Task
Given a set of tags and a video collection, participants are required to automatically assign the tags to each video based on a combination of modalities, i.e., speech, metadata, audio and visual. (Data: Creative Commons internet video, nearly exclusively English, extended from the 2011 collection.)

Affect Task: Violent Scenes Detection
This task requires participants to deploy multimodal features to automatically detect portions of movies containing violent material. Any features automatically extracted from the video, including the subtitles, can be used by participants. (Data: A set of ca. 18 Hollywood movies that must be purchased by the participants.)

Visual Privacy Task
For this task, participants propose methods whereby human faces occurring in digital imagery can be obscured so as to render them unrecognizable.  An optimal balance should be struck between obscuring identity and maintaining the quality of the viewing experience from the user perspective. (Data: about 100 high resolution video files of ca 1m30s each and containing one or more persons in an indoor environment.)

Brave New Tasks
This year, MediaEval will also run three new tasks in the areas of social media, spoken content search and hyperlinking, and music tagging. These tasks are 'by invitation only' and are not included in the general registration form. In order to receive an invitation, please contact the task organizers.

MediaEval 2012 Timeline (dates vary slight from task to task, see the individual task pages for the individual deadlines: http://www.multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2012)

31 May: Last day for regular sign up
1 June: Latest day for development data release
1 July: Latest day for test data release
ca. 10 September: Run submission deadline
28 September: Working notes papers due
4-5 October: MediaEval 2012 Workshop, Pisa, Italy*
*The workshop is timed so that it is possible to attend the 12th European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV 2012 (http://eccv2012.unifi.it/), held 7-13 October in Firenze, Italy, in the same trip.

MediaEval 2012 Coordination
Martha Larson, Delft University of Technology
Gareth Jones, Dublin City University

Contact
For questions or additional information please contact Martha Larson m.a.larson@tudelft.nl or visit visit http://www.multimediaeval.org

MediaEval 2012 Organization Committee:

Robin Aly, University of Twente, Netherlands
Xavier Anguera, Telefonica, Spain
Atta Badii, University of Reading, UK
Etienne Barnard, CSIR, South Africa
Claire-Helene Demarty, Technicolor, France
Maria Eskevich, Dublin City University, Ireland
Gerald Friedland, ICSI, USA
Isabelle Ferrané, University of Toulouse, France
Guillaume Gravier, IRISA, France
Claudia Hauff, TU Delft, Netherlands
Gareth Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland
Pascal Kelm, Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Christoph Kofler, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Chattun Lallah, University of Reading, UK
Martha Larson, TU Delft, Netherlands
Cynthia Liem, TU Delft, Netherlands
Florian Metze, CMU, USA
Vasileios Mezaris, ITI Certh, Greece
Roeland Ordelman, University of Twente and Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Netherlands
Nicola Orio, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
Geoffroy Peeters, Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique Paris, France
Cedric Penet, Technicolor, France
Tomas Piatrik, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Adam Rae, Yahoo! Research, Spain
Nitendra Rajput, IBM Research, India
Markus Schedl, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Austria
Sebastian Schmiedeke, Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Mohammad Soleymani, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Robin Sommer, ICSI/LBNL, USA
Raphael Troncy, Eurecom, France

A large number of projects make a contribution to MediaEval organization, including (alphabetically): AXES (http://www.axes-project.eu), Chorus+ (http://www.ist-chorus.org), CUbRIK (http://www.cubrikproject.eu/), Glocal (http://www.glocal-project.eu), IISSCoS (http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/IISSCoS/), LinkedTV (http://www.linkedtv.eu/), Promise (http://www.promise-noe.eu/), Quaero (http://www.quaero.org), Sealinc Media (http://www.commit-nl.nl/), VideoSense (http://www.videosense.eu/) and SocialSensor (http://www.socialsensor.org/).