Quaero

Quaero is a collaborative research and development program, centered at developing multimedia and multilingual indexing and management tools for professional and general public applications such as the automatic analysis, classification, extraction and exploitation of information.

The research aims to facilitate the extraction of information in unlimited quantities of multimedia and multilingual documents, including written texts, speech and music audio files, and images and videos.

Quaero was created to respond to new needs for the general public and professional use, and new challenges in multimedia content analysis resulting from the explosion of various information types and sources in digital form, available to everyone via personal computers, television and handheld terminals.

LTU began its partnership with Quaero in 2006, and will continue its participation in the exciting collaborations under the Quaero umbrella for  three years.

LTU's multimedia content control solutions will be leveraged in two application projects within the Quaero initiative. LTU will provide image-recognition technology for project MMSE, led by online portal, France Telecom Orange, to develop enhanced multimedia user services for online platforms. Additionally, LTU will contribute its image-based technology to the CMSE project led by Exalead, a global Internet search engine provider, in order to create a state-of-the-art multimedia search engine.

The consortium is composed of French and German public and private research organisations.

The Quaero consortium is coordinated by Thomson. The other large industrial organizations participating are France Telecom, Jouve and Exalead.

Dedicated technology suppliers Bertin, LTU, Synapse and Vecsys will contribute and further develop top notch technologies in their respective business domains.

French and German public research institutes, coordinated by CNRS are CNRS (INIST, LIMSI, IMMI), INRIA, Institut Telecom, IRCAM, IRIT, LIPN, MIG-INRA, Joseph Fourier University, University of Karlsruhe and RWTH Aachen University.

Finally, the participation of public institutions BnF, DGA, Ina and LNE demonstrates the strong support of the public sector to the success of the program.

Quaero  and development program is set to receive 99 million euros in aid from the French agency OSEO that will handle it. Consortium members will contribute an equivalent amount to reach an overall budget of approximately 200 million euros for innovative research projects.