Indexing of fictional video content for event detection and summarisation

This paper presents an approach to movie video indexing that utilises audiovisual analysis to detect important and meaningful temporal video segments, that we term events. We consider three event classes, corresponding to dialogues, action sequences, and montages, where the latter also includes musical sequences. These three event classes are intuitive for a viewer to understand and recognise whilst accounting for over 90% of the content of most movies. To detect events we leverage traditional filmmaking principles and map these to a set of computable low-level audiovisual features. Finite state machines (FSMs) are used to detect when temporal sequences of specific features occur. A set of heuristics, again inspired by filmmaking conventions, are then applied to the output of multiple FSMs to detect the required events. A movie search system, named MovieBrowser, built upon this approach is also described. The overall approach is evaluated against a ground truth of over twenty-three hours of movie content drawn from various genres and consistently obtains high precision and recall for all event classes. A user experiment designed to evaluate the usefulness of an event-based structure for both searching and browsing movie archives is also described and the results indicate the usefulness of the proposed approach

Indexing of fictional video content for event detection and summarisation

This paper presents an approach to movie video indexing that utilises audiovisual analysis to detect important and meaningful temporal video segments, that we term events. We consider three event classes, corresponding to dialogues, action sequences, and montages, where the latter also includes musical sequences. These three event classes are intuitive for a viewer to understand and recognise whilst accounting for over 90% of the content of most movies. To detect events we leverage traditional filmmaking principles and map these to a set of computable low-level audiovisual features. Finite state machines (FSMs) are used to detect when temporal sequences of specific features occur. A set of heuristics, again inspired by filmmaking conventions, are then applied to the output of multiple FSMs to detect the required events. A movie search system, named MovieBrowser, built upon this approach is also described. The overall approach is evaluated against a ground truth of over twenty-three hours of movie content drawn from various genres and consistently obtains high precision and recall for all event classes. A user experiment designed to evaluate the usefulness of an event-based structure for both searching and browsing movie archives is also described and the results indicate the usefulness of the proposed approach

Indexing of fictional video content for event detection and summarisation

This paper presents an approach to movie video indexing that utilises audiovisual analysis to detect important and meaningful temporal video segments, that we term events. We consider three event classes, corresponding to dialogues, action sequences, and montages, where the latter also includes musical sequences. These three event classes are intuitive for a viewer to understand and recognise whilst accounting for over 90% of the content of most movies. To detect events we leverage traditional filmmaking principles and map these to a set of computable low-level audiovisual features. Finite state machines (FSMs) are used to detect when temporal sequences of specific features occur. A set of heuristics, again inspired by filmmaking conventions, are then applied to the output of multiple FSMs to detect the required events. A movie search system, named MovieBrowser, built upon this approach is also described. The overall approach is evaluated against a ground truth of over twenty-three hours of movie content drawn from various genres and consistently obtains high precision and recall for all event classes. A user experiment designed to evaluate the usefulness of an event-based structure for both searching and browsing movie archives is also described and the results indicate the usefulness of the proposed approach

Automatic parsing of sports videos with grammars

Motivated by the analogies between languages and sports videos, we introduce a novel approach for video parsing with grammars. It utilizes compiler techniques for integrating both semantic annotation and syntactic analysis to generate a semantic index of events and a table of content for a given sports video. The video sequence is first segmented and annotated by event detection with domain knowledge. A grammar-based parser is then used to identify the structure of the video content. Meanwhile, facilities for error handling are introduced which are particularly useful when the results of automatic parsing need to be adjusted. As a case study, we have developed a system for video parsing in the particular domain of TV diving programs. Experimental results indicate the proposed approach is effectiv

Sensing and mapping for interactive performance

This paper describes a trans-domain mapping (TDM) framework for translating meaningful activities from one creative domain onto another. The multi-disciplinary framework is designed to facilitate an intuitive and non-intrusive interactive multimedia performance interface that offers the users or performers real-time control of multimedia events using their physical movements. It is intended to be a highly dynamic real-time performance tool, sensing and tracking activities and changes, in order to provide interactive multimedia performances. From a straightforward definition of the TDM framework, this paper reports several implementations and multi-disciplinary collaborative projects using the proposed framework, including a motion and colour-sensitive system, a sensor-based system for triggering musical events, and a distributed multimedia server for audio mapping of a real-time face tracker, and discusses different aspects of mapping strategies in their context. Plausible future directions, developments and exploration with the proposed framework, including stage augmenta tion, virtual and augmented reality, which involve sensing and mapping of physical and non-physical changes onto multimedia control events, are discussed

Multimedia search without visual analysis: the value of linguistic and contextual information

This paper addresses the focus of this special issue by analyzing the potential contribution of linguistic content and other non-image aspects to the processing of audiovisual data. It summarizes the various ways in which linguistic content analysis contributes to enhancing the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and, as a consequence, to improving the effectiveness of conceptual media access tools. A number of techniques are presented, including the time-alignment of textual resources, audio and speech processing, content reduction and reasoning tools, and the exploitation of surface features