MMIS at ImageCLEF 2008: Experiments combining different evidence sources

This paper presents the work of the MMIS group at ImageCLEF 2008. The results for three tasks are presented: Visual Concept Detection Task (VCDT), ImageCLEFphoto and ImageCLEFwiki. We combine image annotations, CBIR, textual relevance and a geographic filter using our generic data fusion method. We also compare methods for BRF and clustering. Our top performing method in the VCDT enhances supervised learning by modifying probabilities based on a matrix that shows how terms appear together. Although it occurred in the top quartile of submitted runs, the enhancement did not provide a statistically significant improvement. In the ImageCLEFphoto task we demonstrate that evidence from image retrieval can provide a contribution to retrieval; however we are yet to find a way of combining text and image evidence in a way to provide an improvement over the baseline. Due to the relative performances of difference evidences in ImageCLEFwiki and our failure to improve over a baseline we conclude that text is the dominant feature in this collection.