Manmatha's Home Page

I am interested in the areas of Information Retrieval, Computer Vision, and at their intersection in Image and Video Retrieval. I am also interested in Document Recognition particularly the retrieval of handwritten manuscripts.

I am a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and work with the Multi-media Indexing and Retrieval (MIR) group at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR). The group's aim is to index non-textual sources of information by either converting them to ASCII text and using a search engine like INQUERY or by directly indexing the information's content.

My current work focuses on:

  1. Automatically Annotating and Retrieving Images. We are doing this using relevance models. This is in collaboration with Jiwoon Jeon and Victor Lavrenko. See the MM-41 paper in the list.
  2. Indexing and Retrieving Handwritten Manuscripts. We are particularly focused on George Washington's manuscripts. I am currently doing this with Toni Rath. Others currently involved include Jamie Rothfeder and Victor Lavrenko. We are using an approach based on relevance models which allow us to use ASCII queries. Previously we used an approach called word spotting (using word image matching) - the idea being to create automatic indices. Go to the publication list to check out papers. New. Check out this demonstration .of a handwriting retrieval system for 1000 pages (8 GB of data) of George Washington's manuscripts based on text queries. This is the first automatic (does not use manual annotations) retrieval system for historical manuscripts.
  3. Meta Search (or combining the outputs of multiple search engines). This work is based on modeling the score distributions of relevant documents as Gaussians and those of non-relevant documents as exponentials. A mixture model can be solved using Expectation-Maximization to recover the parameters of these distributions when relevance is unknown. Primarily with Toni Rath and Fangfang Feng. Some papers on this subject are here.

I have also worked on image matching under deformations (affine, similarity), image retrieval using color and appearance and text detection in images and on the scale space segmentation of handwritten manuscripts.

More on my research.

Here is a list of papers that I have been involved with or associated with.

For a current list of publications go to the CIIR publications website , and select MM - for Multimedia.

This is my picture.

As for other interests, . I used to write stories. Here are two samples The Shadow and Marshall Teddy if you have time to kill.

R. Manmatha
manmatha at cs.umass.edu 

Quote for the day.
From Ignazio Silone's Fontemara
At the head of everything is God, the Lord of Heaven.
Everyone knows that.
Then comes Prince Torlonia, lord of the earth.
Then come Prince Torlonia's guards.
Then come Prince Torlonia's guards' dogs.
Then, nothing at all.
Then, nothing at all.
Then, nothing at all.
Then come the peasants. And that's all.

Click here to go to the CIIR multi-media indexing and retrieval homepage - another old page.