The TRECVID 2007 BBC rushes summarization evaluation pilot

This paper provides an overview of a pilot evaluation of video summaries using rushes from several BBC dramatic series. It was carried out under the auspices of TRECVID. Twenty-two research teams submitted video summaries of up to 4% duration, of 42 individual rushes video files aimed at compressing out redundant and insignificant material. The output of two baseline systems built on straightforward content reduction techniques was contributed by Carnegie Mellon University as a control. Procedures for developing ground truth lists of important segments from each video were developed at Dublin City University and applied to the BBC video. At NIST each summary was judged by three humans with respect to how much of the ground truth was included, how easy the summary was to understand, and how much repeated material the summary contained. Additional objective measures included: how long it took the system to create the summary, how long it took the assessor to judge it against the ground truth, and what the summary's duration was. Assessor agreement on finding desired segments averaged 78% and results indicate that while it is difficult to exceed the performance of baselines, a few systems did

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

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Inférence de la grammaire structurelle d’une émission TV récurrente à partir du contenu

TV program structuring raises as a major theme in last decade for the task of high quality indexing. In this thesis, we address the problem of unsupervised TV program structuring from the point of view of grammatical inference, i.e., discovering a common structural model shared by a collection of episodes of a recurrent program. Using grammatical inference makes it possible to rely on only minimal domain knowledge. In particular, we assume no prior knowledge on the structural elements that might be present in a recurrent program and very limited knowledge on the program type, e.g., to name structural elements, apart from the recurrence. With this assumption, we propose an unsupervised framework operating in two stages. The first stage aims at determining the structural elements that are relevant to the structure of a program. We address this issue making use of the property of element repetitiveness in recurrent programs, leveraging temporal density analysis to filter out irrelevant events and determine valid elements. Having discovered structural elements, the second stage is to infer a grammar of the program. We explore two inference techniques based either on multiple sequence alignment or on uniform resampling. A model of the structure is derived from the grammars and used to predict the structure of new episodes. Evaluations are performed on a selection of four different types of recurrent programs. Focusing on structural element determination, we analyze the effect on the number of determined structural elements, fixing the threshold applied on the density function as well as the size of collection of episodes. For structural grammar inference, we discuss the quality of the grammars obtained and show that they accurately reflect the structure of the program. We also demonstrate that the models obtained by grammatical inference can accurately predict the structure of unseen episodes, conducting a quantitative and comparative evaluation of the two methods by segmenting the new episodes into their structural components. Finally, considering the limitations of our work, we discuss a number of open issues in structure discovery and propose three new research directions to address in future work.Dans cette thèse, on aborde le problème de structuration des programmes télévisés de manière non supervisée à partir du point de vue de l'inférence grammaticale, focalisant sur la découverte de la structure des programmes récurrents à partir une collection homogène. On vise à découvrir les éléments structuraux qui sont pertinents à la structure du programme, et à l’inférence grammaticale de la structure des programmes. Des expérimentations montrent que l'inférence grammaticale permet de utiliser minimum des connaissances de domaine a priori pour atteindre la découverte de la structure des programmes

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio