Section: Software

IKONA/MAESTRO Software

Participants : Vera Bakic, Laurent Joyeux, Souheil Selmi.

IKONA is a generalist software dedicated to content-based visual information indexing and retrieval. It has been designed and implemented in our team during the last years [22] . Its main functionalities are the extraction, the management and the indexing of many state-of-the-art global and local visual features. It offers a wide range of interactive search and navigation methods including query-by-example, query-by-window, matching, relevance feedback, search results clustering or automatic annotation. It can manage several types of input data including images, videos and 3D models.

Based on a client/server architecture, it is easily deployable in any multimedia search engine or service. The communication between the two components is achieved through a proprietary network protocol. It is a set of commands the server understands and a set of answers it returns to the client. The communication protocol is extensible, i.e. it is easy to add new functionalities without disturbing the overall architecture. can be replaced by any new or existing protocol dealing with multimedia information retrieval.

The main processes are on the server side. They can be separated in two main categories:

• off-line processes: data analysis, features extraction and structuring

• on-line processes: answer the client requests

Several clients can communicate with the server. A good starting point for exploring the possibilities offere by IKONA is our web demo, available at https://www.rocq.inria.fr/cgi-bin/imedia/circario.cgi/bio_diversity?select_db=1 . This CGI client is connected to a running server with several generalist and specific image databases, including more than 23,000 images. It features query by example searches, switch database functionality and relevance feedback for image category searches. The second client is a desktop application. It offers more functionalities. More screen-shots describing the visual searching capabilities of IKONA are available at https://www.rocq.inria.fr/cgi-bin/imedia/circario.cgi/demos .

IKONA is a pre-industrial prototype, with exploitation as a final objective. Currently, there does not exist a licensed competitor with the same range of functionalities. It exists several commercial softwares or systems exploiting technologies similar to some functionalities of IKONA but usually not the most advanced ones. We can for example cite the SDK developed by LTU company, the service proposed by AdVestigo company, etc. Many prototypes and demonstrators, industrial or academic, share some functionalities of IKONA but here again not the most advanced (e.g. Google Image Similarity Search Beta, IBM Muffin, etc.).

The main originality of IKONA is its genericity (in terms of visual features, metrics, input data, storage format, etc.), its adaptivity (to new visual features, new indexing structures or new search algorithms), its innovative interactive search functionalities (Local and Global Relevance Feedback, Local Search with Query Expansion, Search results clustering, etc.) and its scalability thanks to a generic indexing structure module than can support the integration of any new advances.

Current Users of IKONA include European and National Projects Participants through its integration in prototype multimedia systems, commercial companies through user trials (EXALEAD, INA, BELGA, AFP), General or Specific Public through Web demos (Pl@ntNet leaf identification demo).

IKONA software provides a high degree of visibility to IMEDIA2 scientific works through demos in commercial, scientific and general public events (notably in most Inria national showrooms). It is also the mainstay of several Multimedia Systems developed at the European level, in conjunction with many Leader European Companies and Research Centers.