High-level feature detection from video in TRECVid: a 5-year retrospective of achievements

Successful and effective content-based access to digital video requires fast, accurate and scalable methods to determine the video content automatically. A variety of contemporary approaches to this rely on text taken from speech within the video, or on matching one video frame against others using low-level characteristics like colour, texture, or shapes, or on determining and matching objects appearing within the video. Possibly the most important technique, however, is one which determines the presence or absence of a high-level or semantic feature, within a video clip or shot. By utilizing dozens, hundreds or even thousands of such semantic features we can support many kinds of content-based video navigation. Critically however, this depends on being able to determine whether each feature is or is not present in a video clip. The last 5 years have seen much progress in the development of techniques to determine the presence of semantic features within video. This progress can be tracked in the annual TRECVid benchmarking activity where dozens of research groups measure the effectiveness of their techniques on common data and using an open, metrics-based approach. In this chapter we summarise the work done on the TRECVid high-level feature task, showing the progress made year-on-year. This provides a fairly comprehensive statement on where the state-of-the-art is regarding this important task, not just for one research group or for one approach, but across the spectrum. We then use this past and on-going work as a basis for highlighting the trends that are emerging in this area, and the questions which remain to be addressed before we can achieve large-scale, fast and reliable high-level feature detection on video

Evaluation campaigns and TRECVid

The TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVid) is an international benchmarking activity to encourage research in video information retrieval by providing a large test collection, uniform scoring procedures, and a forum for organizations interested in comparing their results. TRECVid completed its fifth annual cycle at the end of 2005 and in 2006 TRECVid will involve almost 70 research organizations, universities and other consortia. Throughout its existence, TRECVid has benchmarked both interactive and automatic/manual searching for shots from within a video corpus, automatic detection of a variety of semantic and low-level video features, shot boundary detection and the detection of story boundaries in broadcast TV news. This paper will give an introduction to information retrieval (IR) evaluation from both a user and a system perspective, highlighting that system evaluation is by far the most prevalent type of evaluation carried out. We also include a summary of TRECVid as an example of a system evaluation benchmarking campaign and this allows us to discuss whether such campaigns are a good thing or a bad thing. There are arguments for and against these campaigns and we present some of them in the paper concluding that on balance they have had a very positive impact on research progress

Information Technologies for the Healthcare Delivery System

That modern healthcare requires information technology to be efficient and fully effective is evident if one spends any time observing the delivery of institutional health care. Consider the observation of a practitioner of the discipline, David M. Eddy, MD, PhD, voiced in Clinical Decision Making, JAMA 263:1265-75, 1990, . . .All confirm what would be expected from common sense: The complexity of modern medicine exceeds the inherent limitations of the unaided human mind. The goal of this thesis is to identify the technological factors that are required to enable a fully sufficient application of information technology (IT) to the modern institutional practice of medicine. Perhaps the epitome of healthcare IT is the fully integrated, fully electronic patient medical record. Although, in 1991 the Institute of Medicine called for such a record to be standard technology by 2001, it has still not materialized. The author will argue that some of the technology and standards that are pre-requisite for this achievement have now arrived, while others are still evolving to fully sufficient levels. The paper will concentrate primarily on the health care system in the United States, although much of what is contained is applicable to a large degree, around the world. The paper will illustrate certain of these pre-requisite IT factors by discussing the actual installation of a major health care computer system at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) in Rochester, New York. This system is a Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS). As the name implies, PACS is a system of capturing health care images in digital format, storing them and communicating them to users throughout the enterprise

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

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

Learning to Estimate Robust 3D Human Mesh from In-the-Wild Crowded Scenes

We consider the problem of recovering a single person's 3D human mesh from in-the-wild crowded scenes. While much progress has been in 3D human mesh estimation, existing methods struggle when test input has crowded scenes. The first reason for the failure is a domain gap between training and testing data. A motion capture dataset, which provides accurate 3D labels for training, lacks crowd data and impedes a network from learning crowded scene-robust image features of a target person. The second reason is a feature processing that spatially averages the feature map of a localized bounding box containing multiple people. Averaging the whole feature map makes a target person's feature indistinguishable from others. We present 3DCrowdNet that firstly explicitly targets in-the-wild crowded scenes and estimates a robust 3D human mesh by addressing the above issues. First, we leverage 2D human pose estimation that does not require a motion capture dataset with 3D labels for training and does not suffer from the domain gap. Second, we propose a joint-based regressor that distinguishes a target person's feature from others. Our joint-based regressor preserves the spatial activation of a target by sampling features from the target's joint locations and regresses human model parameters. As a result, 3DCrowdNet learns target-focused features and effectively excludes the irrelevant features of nearby persons. We conduct experiments on various benchmarks and prove the robustness of 3DCrowdNet to the in-the-wild crowded scenes both quantitatively and qualitatively. The code is available at https://github.com/hongsukchoi/3DCrowdNet_RELEASE.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2022, 16 pages including the supplementary materia