今年のACMマルチメディアカンファレンスの一環として、Multimedia Grand Challenge 2009が行われている。これは Google、Yahoo、Nokia、HP、Radvision、CeWeの各社が、ここ2ないし5年間にマルチメディア・テクノロジーの各部門で克服されるべき課題について有益な情報を収集することを目的とするコンペだ。
世界の研究者は上記各社が設定した課題について研究、開発を行うシステムのプロトタイプを作って応募することを求められている。Grand Challengeコンペ（各賞の内容は未定）への応募の締め切りは6月15日。
6社が8つの課題を設定している〔英文〕。それぞれ興味深いテーマだ。
それぞれ面白い、ストレートな技術的課題で、研究者がこれらの課題の解決に向けてどのような提案を行うのか興味が持たれる。Multimedia Grand Challenge 2009に参加したい企業があればまだ受け付けている。このページに詳細が公表されている。
それぞれの課題で最優秀と認められた提案は北京で開催されるACMマルチメディア2009カンファレンスで発表の機会が与えられる。このプレゼンを元にして審査が行われ、Grand Challenge賞が決定される。
われわれはもちろんこの賞についてフォローしていくつもりだ。
Yahoo!
- Robust Automatic Segmentation of Video According to Narrative Themes
The challenge to researchers in the multi-media community 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.
- Robust Clustering Guided by User Intent in Image Search
With the growing number of images on the Internet it is important to have the ability to organize and surface the images in the most efficient, meaningful way possible so that more images can be surfaced to searchers. The challenge to researchers in the multi-media community is to 1) develop a robust way of understanding user intent and 2) generate highly relevant clusters for the given intent and query.
- 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 task would be to take user generated videos (along with their sparse and noisy metadata) and automatically classify them into genres.
Nokia
- Where was this Photo Taken, and How?
This challenge focuses on capture 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.
HP
- Robust Identification of Informative Multimedia Content in Web Pages
In recent years, there is research in web content analysis and extraction that attempts to tackle similar problem, but many emphasize the textual information instead of the associated multimedia data. Thus, this Grand Challenge invites solutions to the robust identification and extraction of informative multimedia content for any arbitrary web page authored in any language, not just English: Ideally, we would like to have a Grand Challenge solution that is over 99% accurate for any web page of any language.
Radvision
- Video Conferencing To Surpass “In-Person” Meeting Experience
The great challenge for Video conferencing vendors is to supply users with a meeting experience that equals or surpasses “in-person” meetings. It is assumed that when meeting experience will be good enough, or even better, the technology could potentially minimize the need for “physical” meetings (at least for business purposes).
- Real-time Data Collaboration Adaptation for Multi-Device Video Conferencing
With the video conferencing market moving out of the meeting rooms and into laptops, netbooks, mobile devices, etc., data collaboration becomes a big challenge. The data, usually sent in high, native PC resolution (such as XGA), has to be adapted to multiple devices, each with its own processing and screen capabilities. 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.
CeWe
- The Next Generation of Tangible Multimedia Products
The open issue is how to help the user determine a meaningful subset of photos out of a collection, which best summarizes and represents the specific event. This is still not satisfactory solved after years of research in multimedia analysis and retrieval.
[原文へ]
（翻訳：Namekawa, U）
