Objective
Tripod's primary objective is to revolutionise access to the enormous body of visual media. Applying an innovative multidisciplinary approach Tripod will utilise largely untapped but vast, accurate and regularly updated sources of semantic information to create ground breaking intuitive search services, enabling users to effortlessly and accurately gain access to the image they seek from this ever expanding resource.
Any image tagged with a direction and location can be harnessed, either legacy photographs with place name captions (therefore all old photos are maintained) or those produced by increasingly prevalent cameras with built in compass and GPS information (thereby managing the future). Tripod will augment images with spatial data to compute contextual information about the location and features of the actual landscape pictured. Using 3D models, buildings and landscape features contained in the image will be identified and located within the picture. Methods from a number of disciplines will use the spatial data to derive additional semantic information about the area photographed. Techniques from Web search and text summarisation will be applied to automatically create textual descriptions of the photographs, producing a rich readable and multifaceted caption far removed from merely location but encompassing culturally encoded notions such as beauty and socially connoted language of place such as suburb, west end, etc.
Like Google, Tripod is domain independent. Its services can be applied to a broad range of searching needs and languages due to the adaptability and flexibility of the caption generation. It is a solution for the exponential swell of images available as it will manage all images with a location and potentially video as well. Tripod will empower the user by adapting the search infrastructure to their complex understanding and language. Thus Tripod manages access to images for the present and the future by bridging the semantic gap.
Funding Scheme
STREP - Specific Targeted Research ProjectCoordinator
Participants (9)
CF24 0DE Cardiff
50122 Firenze
Glasnevin, Dublin 9
50123 Firenze
1079MB Amsterdam
SO16 4GU Southampton
96045 Bamberg
1004 Riga
8006 Zuerich
