Challenges at Riya: A photo organization
and search company

Dr. Baris Sumengen

Date: Friday, May 26, 2006
Place: Humanities and Social Sciences, 1173
Time: 2:00 pm — 3:00 pm

Abstract:
Riya was founded in 2005 with the intent to organize and search all the photos in the world. Existing approaches of just using keywords for photo search is not very helpful with personal photographs, which are usually tagged with keywords such as DSC0009.jpg. As a group of determined image processing, face recognition and text recognition researchers we have been working on technologies to look inside and automatically tag photos. Face detection and recognition, text detection and recognition, color and texture analysis are major technologies used in current Riya system, which is available for public use at Riya.com. Combining computer vision algorithms with data mining we are able to automatically tag personal photographs. In this talk I will talk about the challenges we faced when developing such algorithms.

BARIS SUMENGEN received his BS degree from Bogazici University, Turkey in both electrical engineering and mathematics in 1998. He received the MS degree in 2000 and the PhD degree in 2004 in electrical and computer engineering from University of California at Santa Barbara. From 2004 to 2006, he has been a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara Center for Bio-Image Informatics. Currently he is working at Riya, a photo organization and search company. His research interests include image segmentation and data mining in large multimedia databases.

Host: B.S. Manjunath, Professor of ECE