One benchmarking cycle wraps up, and the next ramps up: News from the MediaEval Multimedia Benchmark

MediaEval, the Multimedia Evaluation Benchmark, has offered a yearly set of multimedia challenges since 2010. MediaEval supports the development of algorithms and technologies for analyzing, exploring and accessing information in multimedia data. MediaEval aims to help make multimedia technology a force for good in society and for this reason focuses on tasks with a human or social aspect. Benchmarking contributes in two ways to advancing multimedia research. First, by offering standardized definitions of tasks and evaluation data sets, it makes it possible to fairly compare algorithms and, in this way, track progress. If we can understand which types of algorithms perform better, we can more easily find ways (and the motivation) to improve them. Second, benchmarking helps to direct the attention of the research community, for example, towards new tasks that are based on real-world needs, or towards known problems for which more research is necessary to have a solution that is good enough for a real world application scenario.