Quaero, a 200-million euro project, is one of the largest industrial R&D projects currently under way in France. Quaero focuses on the design and production of new technological solutions enabling the extraction, analysis, classification, and use of information in digital multimedia and multi-lingual contents, concentrating on the automatic processing of speech, language, music, images, videos, and printed digitalized documents.

The Quareo consortium was created in a world where it is becoming easier and easier to have access to digital information via PCs, television, or handheld devices. The Quareo consortium aims to reply to new demands to analyze multimedia contents from the general public and professionals.

The consortium makes it possible for the most up-to-date technologies developed in public and private laboratories in France and Germany to be used to their fullest potential by key industrial interests in this domain be they small, growing businesses or large industrial groups. The developments made by the Quareo consortium will contribute to the expansion of the services offered by portals, search engines, applications for interactive television, professional environments for the production or post-production of multimedia contents, and will facilitate uploading digital media online for libraries (e.g. books, films, television programs, etc.).

The Quareo project concentrates on five major application domains:

• multimedia online searches,
• improvement of services that provide access to audiovisual contents via portals,
• personalized selection and display of video contents,
• management of professional audiovisual resources,
• digitalization and improvement of library contents, audiovisual archives, and scientific publications.

IRCAM will coordinate the research carried out by partner laboratories on musical indexing and act as a liaison with industrial partners such as Exalead and France Telecom in developing applications for multimedia indexing and in improving services to access audiovisual content.

Project Details

Program

Agence pour l'innovation industrielle (OSEO)

URL

www.quaero.org

Participants

Coordinator

Thomson

Partners

Bertin
BNF
DGA
Exalead, FR
France Telecom, FR
Ina, FR
INRA
Inria, FR
Institut TELECOM
IRCAM, FR (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique)
IRIT
LIPN
LNE
LTU Technologies
Synapse Développement
Thomson
Université de Karlsruhe
Université Joseph Fourier
Université RWTH d'Aix-la-Chapelle
Vecsys
Vecsys-Research