ImageCLEF 2013: The Vision, the Data and the Open Challenges

This paper presents an overview of the ImageCLEF 2013 lab. Since its first edition in 2003, ImageCLEF has become one of the key initiative promoting the benchmark evaluation of algorithms for the cross-language annotation and retrieval of images in various domains, from public and personal photo collections to medical images, to data acquired by mobile robot platforms to botanic collections. Over the years, by providing new data collections and challenging tasks to the community of interest, the ImageCLEF lab has achieved an unique position in the multi lingual image annotation and retrieval research landscape. The 2013 edition consisted of three tasks: the photo annotation and retrieval task, the plant identification task and the robot vision task. Furthermore, the medical annotation task, that traditionally has been under the ImageCLEF umbrella and that this year celebrates its tenth anniversary, has been organized in conjunction with AMIA this year for the first time. The paper describes the tasks and the 2013 competition, giving an unifying perspective of the present activities of the lab while discussion the future challenges and opportunities.