Scene of Crime Information System: Playing at St. Andrews

This paper discusses the adaptation of the Scene of Crime Information System developed within an EPSRC-funded project, to the collection of data within the ImageCLEF track of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum 2003. The adaptations necessary to participate in this activity are detailed, and initial results are briefly presented. 1. ImageCLEF Collection ImageCLEF is concerned with the retrieval of images from a specific collection by the captions associated to those images, and is running in relation to an EPSRC-funded project at Sheffield University (Eurovision, GR/R56778/01). The image collection consists of around 28,133 images from the photographic collection provided by St Andrews University Library (Clough et al. 2003). The 28133 images are each referred to and annotated by a single text file, and the full set of annotations are contained within one SGML-based document. Each annotation comprises identifiers to the text file and the image files (DOCNO, SMALL_IMG, LARGE_IMG), the caption of the image (HEADLINE), a set of categories that have been assigned to this image (CATEGORIES), a database record identifier (RECORD_ID) and an unlabelled chunk of text describing the image, denoted below in italics. stand03_2093/stand03_27914.txt The Open Championship, St Andrews 1955. Dai Rees and Max Faulkner fishing. GMC-.000007.-.000009.-.000021 Rees and Faulkner fishing. Three men in rowing boat tied up at jetty, one holding two fishing rods, one holding oar. July 1955 George Middlemass Cowie Fife, Scotland GMC-7-9-21 mb/ [piers and landing stages],[Fife all views],[rowing boats],[golf general],[golf British Open],[rowing],[angling],[battlefields],[fresh water fishing],[fishing vessels],[fishing equipment] stand03_2093/stand03_27914.jpg stand03_2093/stand03_27914_big.jpg The information encoded in the XML is intended for use in the retrieval task. By ranked retrieval matching, a set of upto 1000 images is to be retrieved for Task 1, automatic ad hoc retrieval, of the track, and for other purposes in Task 2, interactive image retrieval, of the track. The above XML fragment refers to the image shown below, of three men in a boat, in Figure 1. Figure 1: Example Image from the ImageCLEF collection 1 Although the file was proclaimed to be XML, a number of non-Unicode characters prevented its parsing. It was necessary to replace these with their Hex sequences, ensuring full XML-conformance, to use this collection. From the above example, it is apparent that some of the categories assigned to the images may not be wholly reliable. While some of the associations are clear: jetty piers and landing stages