Identifying person re-occurrences for personal photo management applications

Automatic identification of "who" is present in individual digital images within a photo management system using only content-based analysis is an extremely difficult problem. The authors present a system which enables identification of person reoccurrences within a personal photo management application by combining image content-based analysis tools with context data from image capture. This combined system employs automatic face detection and body-patch matching techniques, which collectively facilitate identifying person re-occurrences within images grouped into events based on context data. The authors introduce a face detection approach combining a histogram-based skin detection model and a modified BDF face detection method to detect multiple frontal faces in colour images. Corresponding body patches are then automatically segmented relative to the size, location and orientation of the detected faces in the image. The authors investigate the suitability of using different colour descriptors, including MPEG-7 colour descriptors, color coherent vectors (CCV) and color correlograms for effective body-patch matching. The system has been successfully integrated into the MediAssist platform, a prototype Web-based system for personal photo management, and runs on over 13000 personal photos

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

Coherent segmentation of video into syntactic regions

In this paper we report on our work in realising an approach to video shot matching which involves automatically segmenting video into abstract intertwinded shapes in such a way that there is temporal coherency. These shapes representing approximations of objects and background regions can then be matched giving fine-grained shot-shot matching. The main contributions of the paper are firstly the extension of our segmentation algorithm for still images to spatial segmentation in video, and secondly the introduction a measurement of temporal coherency of the spatial segmentation. This latter allows us to quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on real video data

A histogram-based approach for object-based query-by-shape-and-color in image and video databases

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Considering the fact that querying by low-level object features is essential in image and video data, an efficient approach for querying and retrieval by shape and color is proposed. The approach employs three specialized histograms, (i.e. distance, angle, and color histograms) to store feature-based information that is extracted from objects. The objects can be extracted from images or video frames. The proposed histogram-based approach is used as a component in the query-by-feature subsystem of a video database management system. The color and shape information is handled together to enrich the querying capabilities for content-based retrieval. The evaluation of the retrieval effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed approach is presented via performance experiments. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved

Visual Information Retrieval in Endoscopic Video Archives

In endoscopic procedures, surgeons work with live video streams from the inside of their subjects. A main source for documentation of procedures are still frames from the video, identified and taken during the surgery. However, with growing demands and technical means, the streams are saved to storage servers and the surgeons need to retrieve parts of the videos on demand. In this submission we present a demo application allowing for video retrieval based on visual features and late fusion, which allows surgeons to re-find shots taken during the procedure.Comment: Paper accepted at the IEEE/ACM 13th International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI) in Prague (Czech Republic) between 10 and 12 June 201

The TREC-2002 video track report

TREC-2002 saw the second running of the Video Track, the goal of which was to promote progress in content-based retrieval from digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. The track used 73.3 hours of publicly available digital video (in MPEG-1/VCD format) downloaded by the participants directly from the Internet Archive (Prelinger Archives) (internetarchive, 2002) and some from the Open Video Project (Marchionini, 2001). The material comprised advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films produced between the 1930's and the 1970's by corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, educational institutions, and individuals. 17 teams representing 5 companies and 12 universities - 4 from Asia, 9 from Europe, and 4 from the US - participated in one or more of three tasks in the 2001 video track: shot boundary determination, feature extraction, and search (manual or interactive). Results were scored by NIST using manually created truth data for shot boundary determination and manual assessment of feature extraction and search results. This paper is an introduction to, and an overview of, the track framework - the tasks, data, and measures - the approaches taken by the participating groups, the results, and issues regrading the evaluation. For detailed information about the approaches and results, the reader should see the various site reports in the final workshop proceedings

Scene Determination based on Video and Audio Features

Determination of scenes from a video is a challenging task. When asking humans for it, results will be inconsistent since the term scene is not precisely defined. It leaves it up to each human to set shared attributes which integrate shots to scenes. However, consistent results can be found for certain basic attributes like dialogs, same settings and continuing sounds. We have therefore developed a scene determination scheme which clusters shots based on detected dialogs, same settings and similar audio. Our experimental results show that automatic deter mination of these types of scenes can be performed reliably