The Community of Multimedia Agents

Multimedia data mining requires the ability to automatically analyze and understand the content. The Community of Multimedia Agents project is devoted to creating a community of researchers and students who are interested in developing multimedia annotation algorithms. It provides an open environment for developing, testing, learning and prototyping multimedia content analysis and annotation methods. It serves as a medium for researchers to contribute and share their achievements while protecting their proprietary techniques. Each method is represented as an agent that can communicate with the other agents registered in the environment using templates that are based on the descriptors and description schemes in the MPEG-7 standard. Using the standard allows agents that are developed by different organizations to operate and communicate with each other seamlessly regardless of their programming languages and internal architecture. A development environment is provided to facilitate the construction of media analysis methods. The tool contains a workbench, which allows the user integrating agents to build more sophisticated systems, and a blackboard browser, which visualizes the processing results. It enables researchers to compare the performance of different agents and combine them to build a rapid prototype of more powerful and robust system. The Community can also serve as a learning environment for researchers and students to acquire and exchange of cutting edge multimedia analysis algorithms.