Circulant temporal encoding for video retrieval and temporal alignment

We address the problem of specific video event retrieval. Given a query video of a specific event, e.g., a concert of Madonna, the goal is to retrieve other videos of the same event that temporally overlap with the query. Our approach encodes the frame descriptors of a video to jointly represent their appearance and temporal order. It exploits the properties of circulant matrices to efficiently compare the videos in the frequency domain. This offers a significant gain in complexity and accurately localizes the matching parts of videos. The descriptors can be compressed in the frequency domain with a product quantizer adapted to complex numbers. In this case, video retrieval is performed without decompressing the descriptors. We also consider the temporal alignment of a set of videos. We exploit the matching confidence and an estimate of the temporal offset computed for all pairs of videos by our retrieval approach. Our robust algorithm aligns the videos on a global timeline by maximizing the set of temporally consistent matches. The global temporal alignment enables synchronous playback of the videos of a given scene

Action Recognition in Videos: from Motion Capture Labs to the Web

This paper presents a survey of human action recognition approaches based on visual data recorded from a single video camera. We propose an organizing framework which puts in evidence the evolution of the area, with techniques moving from heavily constrained motion capture scenarios towards more challenging, realistic, "in the wild" videos. The proposed organization is based on the representation used as input for the recognition task, emphasizing the hypothesis assumed and thus, the constraints imposed on the type of video that each technique is able to address. Expliciting the hypothesis and constraints makes the framework particularly useful to select a method, given an application. Another advantage of the proposed organization is that it allows categorizing newest approaches seamlessly with traditional ones, while providing an insightful perspective of the evolution of the action recognition task up to now. That perspective is the basis for the discussion in the end of the paper, where we also present the main open issues in the area.Comment: Preprint submitted to CVIU, survey paper, 46 pages, 2 figures, 4 table

Twofold Video Hashing with Automatic Synchronization

Video hashing finds a wide array of applications in content authentication, robust retrieval and anti-piracy search. While much of the existing research has focused on extracting robust and secure content descriptors, a significant open challenge still remains: Most existing video hashing methods are fallible to temporal desynchronization. That is, when the query video results by deleting or inserting some frames from the reference video, most existing methods assume the positions of the deleted (or inserted) frames are either perfectly known or reliably estimated. This assumption may be okay under typical transcoding and frame-rate changes but is highly inappropriate in adversarial scenarios such as anti-piracy video search. For example, an illegal uploader will try to bypass the 'piracy check' mechanism of YouTube/Dailymotion etc by performing a cleverly designed non-uniform resampling of the video. We present a new solution based on dynamic time warping (DTW), which can implement automatic synchronization and can be used together with existing video hashing methods. The second contribution of this paper is to propose a new robust feature extraction method called flow hashing (FH), based on frame averaging and optical flow descriptors. Finally, a fusion mechanism called distance boosting is proposed to combine the information extracted by DTW and FH. Experiments on real video collections show that such a hash extraction and comparison enables unprecedented robustness under both spatial and temporal attacks.Comment: submitted to Image Processing (ICIP), 2014 21st IEEE International Conference o

Automatic semantic video annotation in wide domain videos based on similarity and commonsense knowledgebases

In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for automatic Semantic Video Annotation. As this framework detects possible events occurring in video clips, it forms the annotating base of video search engine. To achieve this purpose, the system has to able to operate on uncontrolled wide-domain videos. Thus, all layers have to be based on generic features. This framework aims to bridge the "semantic gap", which is the difference between the low-level visual features and the human's perception, by finding videos with similar visual events, then analyzing their free text annotation to find a common area then to decide the best description for this new video using commonsense knowledgebases. Experiments were performed on wide-domain video clips from the TRECVID 2005 BBC rush standard database. Results from these experiments show promising integrity between those two layers in order to find expressing annotations for the input video. These results were evaluated based on retrieval performance

ARCHANGEL: Tamper-proofing Video Archives using Temporal Content Hashes on the Blockchain

We present ARCHANGEL; a novel distributed ledger based system for assuring the long-term integrity of digital video archives. First, we describe a novel deep network architecture for computing compact temporal content hashes (TCHs) from audio-visual streams with durations of minutes or hours. Our TCHs are sensitive to accidental or malicious content modification (tampering) but invariant to the codec used to encode the video. This is necessary due to the curatorial requirement for archives to format shift video over time to ensure future accessibility. Second, we describe how the TCHs (and the models used to derive them) are secured via a proof-of-authority blockchain distributed across multiple independent archives. We report on the efficacy of ARCHANGEL within the context of a trial deployment in which the national government archives of the United Kingdom, Estonia and Norway participated.Comment: Accepted to CVPR Blockchain Workshop 201