InfoLink: analysis of Dutch broadcast news and cross-media browsing

In this paper, a cross-media browsing demonstrator named InfoLink is described. InfoLink automatically links the content of Dutch broadcast news videos to related information sources in parallel collections containing text and/or video. Automatic segmentation, speech recognition and available meta-data are used to index and link items. The concept is visualised using SMIL-scripts for presenting the streaming broadcast news video and the information links

The Físchlár-News-Stories system: personalised access to an archive of TV news

The “Físchlár” systems are a family of tools for capturing, analysis, indexing, browsing, searching and summarisation of digital video information. Físchlár-News-Stories, described in this paper, is one of those systems, and provides access to a growing archive of broadcast TV news. Físchlár-News-Stories has several notable features including the fact that it automatically records TV news and segments a broadcast news program into stories, eliminating advertisements and credits at the start/end of the broadcast. Físchlár-News-Stories supports access to individual stories via calendar lookup, text search through closed captions, automatically-generated links between related stories, and personalised access using a personalisation and recommender system based on collaborative filtering. Access to individual news stories is supported either by browsing keyframes with synchronised closed captions, or by playback of the recorded video. One strength of the Físchlár-News-Stories system is that it is actually used, in practice, daily, to access news. Several aspects of the Físchlár systems have been published before, bit in this paper we give a summary of the Físchlár-News-Stories system in operation by following a scenario in which it is used and also outlining how the underlying system realises the functions it offers

Interactive searching and browsing of video archives: using text and using image matching

Over the last number of decades much research work has been done in the general area of video and audio analysis. Initially the applications driving this included capturing video in digital form and then being able to store, transmit and render it, which involved a large effort to develop compression and encoding standards. The technology needed to do all this is now easily available and cheap, with applications of digital video processing now commonplace, ranging from CCTV (Closed Circuit TV) for security, to home capture of broadcast TV on home DVRs for personal viewing. One consequence of the development in technology for creating, storing and distributing digital video is that there has been a huge increase in the volume of digital video, and this in turn has created a need for techniques to allow effective management of this video, and by that we mean content management. In the BBC, for example, the archives department receives approximately 500,000 queries per year and has over 350,000 hours of content in its library. Having huge archives of video information is hardly any benefit if we have no effective means of being able to locate video clips which are of relevance to whatever our information needs may be. In this chapter we report our work on developing two specific retrieval and browsing tools for digital video information. Both of these are based on an analysis of the captured video for the purpose of automatically structuring into shots or higher level semantic units like TV news stories. Some also include analysis of the video for the automatic detection of features such as the presence or absence of faces. Both include some elements of searching, where a user specifies a query or information need, and browsing, where a user is allowed to browse through sets of retrieved video shots. We support the presentation of these tools with illustrations of actual video retrieval systems developed and working on hundreds of hours of video content

Indexing, browsing and searching of digital video

Video is a communications medium that normally brings together moving pictures with a synchronised audio track into a discrete piece or pieces of information. The size of a “piece ” of video can variously be referred to as a frame, a shot, a scene, a clip, a programme or an episode, and these are distinguished by their lengths and by their composition. We shall return to the definition of each of these in section 4 this chapter. In modern society, video is ver

Video browsing interfaces and applications: a review

We present a comprehensive review of the state of the art in video browsing and retrieval systems, with special emphasis on interfaces and applications. There has been a significant increase in activity (e.g., storage, retrieval, and sharing) employing video data in the past decade, both for personal and professional use. The ever-growing amount of video content available for human consumption and the inherent characteristics of video data—which, if presented in its raw format, is rather unwieldy and costly—have become driving forces for the development of more effective solutions to present video contents and allow rich user interaction. As a result, there are many contemporary research efforts toward developing better video browsing solutions, which we summarize. We review more than 40 different video browsing and retrieval interfaces and classify them into three groups: applications that use video-player-like interaction, video retrieval applications, and browsing solutions based on video surrogates. For each category, we present a summary of existing work, highlight the technical aspects of each solution, and compare them against each other

Semantic user profiling techniques for personalised multimedia recommendation

Due to the explosion of news materials available through broadcast and other channels, there is an increasing need for personalised news video retrieval. In this work, we introduce a semantic-based user modelling technique to capture users’ evolving information needs. Our approach exploits implicit user interaction to capture long-term user interests in a profile. The organised interests are used to retrieve and recommend news stories to the users. In this paper, we exploit the Linked Open Data Cloud to identify similar news stories that match the users’ interest. We evaluate various recommendation parameters by introducing a simulation-based evaluation scheme

The Físchlár digital library: networked access to a video archive of TV news

This paper presents an overview of the Físchlár digital library, a collection of over 300 hours of broadcast TV content which has been indexed to allow searching, browsing and playback of video. The system is in daily use by over 1,500 users on our University campus and is used for teaching and learning, for research, and for entertainment. It is shortly to be made available to University libraries elsewhere in Ireland. The infrastructure we use is a Gigabit ETHERNET backbone and a conventional web browser for searching and browsing video content, with a browser plug-in for streaming video. As well as providing an overview of the system, the paper concentrates on the complimentary navigation techniques of browsing and searching which are supported within Físchlár

News story segmentation in the Físchlár video indexing system

This paper presents an approach to segmenting individual news stories in broadcast news programmes. The approach first performs shot boundary detection and keyframe extraction on the programme. Shots are then clustered into groups based on their colour and temporal similarity. The clustering process is controlled using the groups' statistics. After clustering, a set of criteria are applied and groups are successively eliminated in order to converge upon a set of anchorperson groups. The temporal locations of the shots in these anchorperson groups are then used to segment the programme in terms of individual news items. This work is carried out within the context of a complete video indexing, browsing and retrieval syste

Dublin City University video track experiments for TREC 2003

In this paper, we describe our experiments for both the News Story Segmentation task and Interactive Search task for TRECVID 2003. Our News Story Segmentation task involved the use of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to combine evidence from audio-visual analysis tools in order to generate a listing of news stories from a given news programme. Our Search task experiment compared a video retrieval system based on text, image and relevance feedback with a text-only video retrieval system in order to identify which was more effective. In order to do so we developed two variations of our Físchlár video retrieval system and conducted user testing in a controlled lab environment. In this paper we outline our work on both of these two tasks

Exploration of audiovisual heritage using audio indexing technology

This paper discusses audio indexing tools that have been implemented for the disclosure of Dutch audiovisual cultural heritage collections. It explains the role of language models and their adaptation to historical settings and the adaptation of acoustic models for homogeneous audio collections. In addition to the benefits of cross-media linking, the requirements for successful tuning and improvement of available tools for indexing the heterogeneous A/V collections from the cultural heritage domain are reviewed. And finally the paper argues that research is needed to cope with the varying information needs for different types of users