Multimedia Grand Challenge

MM2010: The Multimedia Grand Challenge Continues

Submission Deadline: August 1, 2010
Date: Oct 25th, 2010
Location: Florence, Italy

What problems do Google, Yahoo!, HP, Radvision, CeWe, Nokia and other companies see driving the future of multimedia? The Multimedia Grand Challenge is a set of problems and issues from these industry leaders, geared to engage the Multimedia research community towards solving relevant, interesting and challenging questions in the multimedia industry's 2-5 year horizon. The Grand Challenge was first presented as part of ACM Multimedia 2009. and it will be presented again in slightly modified form at ACM Multimedia 2010. Researchers are encouraged to submit working systems in response to these challenges to win the grand Challenge competition!

CeWe Challenge

Automatic Theme Identification of Photo Sets.

The challenge CEWE wants to address is to support users selecting and assigning the right style (event, season, design) to an individual photo set. The goal is to provide the user with a reasonable selection of styles fitting the user's preferences, the images in the set and the current structure of a photo set.

Google Challenge

1. Robust, As-Accurate-As-Human Genre Classification for Video.

A notion of browsing collections is naturally associated with videos. Having videos classified into a pre-existing hierarchy of genres is one way to make the browsing task easier. The goal of this challenge would be to take user generated videos along with their metadata and automatically classify them into genres.

2. Indexing and Fast Interactive Searching in Personal Diaries.

The developing interest in recording digital diaries or archives of one's life needs a good indexing and search capability to be useful or interesting. The challenge is to develop good schema, algorithms, UI, etc., that make multimedia diaries accessible. Specializations to certain contexts, as well as generic systems, are all of interest.

HP Challenge

High Impact Visual Communication.

Images can serve as a powerful communications vehicle, conveying a wealth of information as well as emotional impact. How do we create a high impact picture that can convey information across cultural boundaries and find a thousand words that best describe such a picture? The challenge is to find a solution, which can create a collage and generate a textual description that tells the story of a set of photos.

Nokia Challenge

Where was this Photo Taken, and How?

This challenge focuses on capture camera phone device location and orientation, one dimension of content metadata. The problem can be stated simply: try to derive exact camera poses (location and orientation) of given photos that are lacking location annotation. This kind of technology could potentially be used to add metadata to existing or newly captured photos.

Radvision Challenges

1. Video Conferencing To Surpass "In-Person" Meeting Experience.

This challenge focuses on developing new technologies and ideas to surpass the "in-person" meeting experience. In the process a set of subjective and objective measures to evaluate "meeting" experience will be developed. With these measures, alternative solutions could be compared to each other and to in-person meetings, and optimized accordingly.

2. Real-time Data Collaboration Adaptation for Multi-Device Video Conferencing.

This challenge focuses on adapting, in real-time, the data collaboration channel to different receiving devices, in a way that would be regarded as optimal perceptually by users. Specifically, it involves adapting a free-hand drawing on a virtual whiteboard designed for display on a desktop screen to such receiving devices.

Yahoo Challenges

1. Robust Automatic Segmentation of Video According to Narrative Themes.

The challenge is to develop methods, techniques, and algorithms to automatically generate narrative themes for a given video, as well as present the content in an easy-to-consume manner to end-users in a search engine experience.

2. Novel Image Understanding.

The challenge wants to move beyond simple image classification. There are many ways to organize photos. What are the ways that are not obvious? What can we do better than we can do today?

3DLife Challenge

Sports Activity Analysis in Camera Networks.

This challenge focuses on exploring the limits of what is possible in terms of 2D and 3D data extraction from a low-cost camera network for tennis matches. We are interested in submissions that explore the limits of what is possible from a provided real-world capture scenario in terms of: player localization, event-based analysis and human behavior modeling, 3D reconstruction, longitudinal analysis, and novel visualization mechanisms.

To summarize,

We encourage you to consider the challenges and submit your contribution to the ACM Multimedia 2010 Grand Challenge track. The top submissions will be presented in a special event during the ACM Multimedia 2010 conference in Florence Italy. Based on these oral presentations in Florence, winners will be selected for Grand Challenge awards worth 1500 USD.

New in 2010: any long, short or demo paper submitted to the regular ACM Multimedia conference can be considered for the Grand Challenge. Regular papers that want to be considered should submit a 1-page additional statement indicating why this work addresses a certain challenge best. In addition, papers, demonstrations and ideas that do not fit the normal scientific style may be submitted to the Grand Challenge by submitting a separate 4-page paper to the Grand Challenge only. The submissions must:

• Significantly address one of the industry challenges posted on the Grand Challenge web site.
• Depict working, presentable systems or demos.
• Describe why the system presents a novel and interesting solution.

Submit contributions or solutions to the ACM Multimedia 2010 Grand Challenge track by August 1. See http://www.multimediagrandchallenge.com for up-to-date submission details.

A number of solutions will be selected as finalists and invited to describe their work, demonstrate their solution and argue for the paper's success in the Grand Challenge Session in Florence. Each finalist will have several minutes to present their case. Final winner(s) will be chosen by industry scientists, engineers and business luminaries.

See you in Florence!