Semaine 10 vendredi - Le Plan

~ vendredi ~

In order to submit to a workshop, we must expand the depth in all directions, including:

• Getting more cuisines and more dishes for the database
• Looking closer at the different SVM kernels and how well they can work
• Different low-level feature descriptors (currently using EMD, there's also RGB histogram and other features that preserve color information, and then SIFT and others that discard color information, might serve well to compare perserving vs. discarding color)
• Maybe the attribute (ingredient) types we chose and how effective they are (this requires relabeling if change)
• Any other part of the pipeline

The top concern is expanding the database, because labeling takes a lot of time, especially when we expand to more cuisines and more dishes. We might even consider Mechanical Turk from Amazon. Hmm I haven't used it before so I'll have to look at how to set it up, etc.

So we already have the code to grab images from Flickr, but we've found that Google Image's results are much higher quality and clearer than Flickr images, so it is desirable to have a batch downloading code / software for Google Image.

Resources I've found:

// Seems like it could only do the first page
Google Image Ripper - online service
http://www.dearcomputer.nl/gir/
Linked from
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/07/how-to-leech-pictures-from-flickr-or.html
"This online service extracts the full size images [no thumbnails] from Google index and displays them in one page. You can then save the full page with attachments to build your offline gallery of Google Images."

// Hmm didn't work, probably old software
MultiImageDownloader (freeware, looks like this download is Windows only?)
http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/download-google-images-in-bulk/
Download page
http://www.freewarefiles.com/MultiImageDownloader_program_55357.html
Its Developer's page
http://chesterway.co.uk/

// Trial version only allows 30 images to be downloaded...

WebImageGrab (formerly Googlegrab, Windows & Mac OS)

http://www.sas21.de/apps/webimagegrab/

Review 

http://www.ghacks.net/2006/07/22/grab-images-from-google-image-search/

Batch Image Downloader - Firefox Addon on Google Code, Downloads selected images on a webpage
http://code.google.com/p/batch-images-downloader/

Review articles about various tools to batch download images from the web
http://www.ghacks.net/tag/download-images/


My second concern is that once the database is expanded, the algorithm won't work anymore! Hahaha... yeah. We'll see.

The other detail-looks listed above require some additions to the code, such as adding code that calculates other feature descriptors, rerunning with different SVM parameters, and other experiments.