Photographic Image Retrieval

CLEF1 was the first benchmarking campaign that organized an evaluation event for image retrieval: the ImageCLEF photographic ad hoc retrieval task in 2003. Since then, this task has become one of the most popular tasks of ImageCLEF, providing both the resources and a framework necessary to carry out comparative laboratory-style evaluation of multi-lingual visual information retrieval from photographic collections. Running for seven years, several challenges have been given to participants, including: retrieval from a collection of historic photographs; retrieval from a more generic collection with multi-lingual annotations; and retrieval from a large news archive, promoting result diversity. This chapter summarizes each of these tasks, describes the individual test collections and evaluation scenarios, analyzes the retrieval results, and discusses potential findings for a number of research questions.