SPE, initially developed in 2003 and launched officially on October 2, 2007, is a Story Picturing Engine that takes a story entered/uploaded by the user and returns a picture storyboard that visualizes the story with a series of pictures. It acts as a gateway to image searching, which can be done through alipr.com, a search engine that finds images based on a comprehensive database of images with computer-based and human-based tagging. SPE can be used for educational purposes, such as locating pictures related to a lesson, or for personal purposes, such as creating a slideshow to accompany blogs, emails, or other stories. The system shown here is a prototype for illustrating stories using Web images. For special applications, such as education, specialized image databases are needed.

SPE was mainly developed by Dr. Dhiraj Joshi during his graduate study at Penn State between 2004 and 2007. He is now a Scientist at Kodak Research, Rochester, NY. The work has been carried out under the supervision of Penn State faculty James Wang and Jia Li. Visiting student Angela Yen from MIT created the initial Website for SPE.

Publications about SPE:

1. D. Joshi, J. Z. Wang and J. Li ``The Story Picturing Engine - A System for Automatic Text Illustration,'' ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 68-89, 2006. (download) (g-scholar)
   
   
2. D. Joshi, J. Z. Wang and J. Li, ``The Story Picturing Engine: Finding Elite Images to Illustrate a Story Using Mutual Reinforcement,'' Proc. 6th International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval, in conjunction with ACM Multimedia, pp. 119-126, New York, NY, ACM, October 2004. (download) (g-scholar)

Sponsorship: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0347148. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation has funded some work which laid the foundation to the deployment of version 1.0 of ALIPR. We are currently seeking funding to significantly improve this technology and make it more useful. If you would like to sponsor or partner with us, please contact James Wang. We are in great need of hardware support to make this site useful to the public. If you work for one of the hardware companies and would like to sponsor some storage, server, and networking equipment, we will put a logo of your company on this site.

If you have questions or comments, please email James Wang ().