Caliph&Emir: Semantic Annotation and Retrieval in Personal Digital Photo Libraries

Nowadays research and development activities are accompanied by an increasing focus on future user needs in the field of multimedia retrieval. The fast growing of multimedia data repositories is an undeniable fact. Besides big companies like newspaper publishers, broadcasting stations, car manufacturers etc., dealing with digital content, an increasing number of private users invent private multimedia repositories for their self-made photos and videos. The development of suitable tools has to fulfill special requirements concerning the storage, indexing and retrieval of multimedia content. In addition easy-to-use content exchange via the Internet is a preferable feature. The transition from text to photo retrieval raises the necessity of additional meta-information about the content to allow semantic retrieval. As a result metadata has to be generated, stored and indexed to enrich raw visual information. As a result and proof of concept a pair of prototypes, called “Caliph & Emir”, are presented.