An Illustrated Methodology for Evaluating ASR Systems

Proceeding of: 9th International Workshop on Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval (AMR 2011) Took place 2011, July, 18-19, in Barcelona, Spain. The event Web site is http://stel.ub.edu/amr2011/Automatic speech recognition technology can be integrated in an information retrieval process to allow searching on multimedia contents. But, in order to assure an adequate retrieval performance is necessary to state the quality of the recognition phase, especially in speaker-independent and domainindependent environments. This paper introduces a methodology to accomplish the evaluation of different speech recognition systems in several scenarios considering also the creation of new corpora of different types (broadcast news, interviews, etc.), especially in other languages apart from English that are not widely addressed in speech community.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Center for Industry Technological Development (CDTI, Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade), through the BUSCAMEDIA Project (CEN-20091026). And also by MA2VICMR: Improving the access, analysis and visibility of the multilingual and multimedia information in web for the Region of Madrid (S2009/TIC-1542).Publicad

Some Experiments in Evaluating ASR Systems Applied to Multimedia Retrieval

Proceedings of: 7th International Workshop on Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval (AMR 2009). Took place 2009, September 24-25, in Madrid. The event Web site is http://nlp.uned.es/amr2009/This paper describes some tests performed on different types of voice/audio input applying three commercial speech recognition tools. Three multimedia retrieval scenarios are considered: a question answering system, an automatic transcription of audio from video files and a real-time captioning system used in the classroom for deaf students. A software tool, RET (Recognition Evaluation Tool), has been developed to test the output of commercial ASR systems.This research work has been supported by the Regional Government of Madrid under the Research Network MA2VICMR (S2009/TIC-1542) and by the Spanish Ministry of Education under the project BRAVO (TIN2007-67407-C03-01).Publicad

Toward an adaptive video retrieval system

Unlike text retrieval systems, retrieval of digital video libraries is facing a challenging problem: the semantic gap. Th is is the diff erence between the low-level data representation of videos and the higher level concepts that a user associates with video. In 2005, the panel members of the International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval identifi ed this gap as one of the main technical problems in multimedia retrieval (Jaimes et al. 2005), carrying the potential to dominate the research eff orts in multimedia retrieval for the next few years. Retrievable information such as textual sources of video clips (i.e., speech transcripts) is often not reliable enough to describe the actual content of a clip. Moreover, the approach of using visual features and automatically detecting high-level concepts, which have been the main focus of study within the international video processing and evaluation campaign TRECVID (Smeaton et al. 2006), turned out to be insuffi cient to bridge the semantic gap

CHORUS Deliverable 4.3: Report from CHORUS workshops on national initiatives and metadata

Minutes of the following Workshops: • National Initiatives on Multimedia Content Description and Retrieval, Geneva, October 10th, 2007. • Metadata in Audio-Visual/Multimedia production and archiving, Munich, IRT, 21st – 22nd November 2007 Workshop in Geneva 10/10/2007 This highly successful workshop was organised in cooperation with the European Commission. The event brought together the technical, administrative and financial representatives of the various national initiatives, which have been established recently in some European countries to support research and technical development in the area of audio-visual content processing, indexing and searching for the next generation Internet using semantic technologies, and which may lead to an internet-based knowledge infrastructure. The objective of this workshop was to provide a platform for mutual information and exchange between these initiatives, the European Commission and the participants. Top speakers were present from each of the national initiatives. There was time for discussions with the audience and amongst the European National Initiatives. The challenges, communalities, difficulties, targeted/expected impact, success criteria, etc. were tackled. This workshop addressed how these national initiatives could work together and benefit from each other. Workshop in Munich 11/21-22/2007 Numerous EU and national research projects are working on the automatic or semi-automatic generation of descriptive and functional metadata derived from analysing audio-visual content. The owners of AV archives and production facilities are eagerly awaiting such methods which would help them to better exploit their assets.Hand in hand with the digitization of analogue archives and the archiving of digital AV material, metadatashould be generated on an as high semantic level as possible, preferably fully automatically. All users of metadata rely on a certain metadata model. All AV/multimedia search engines, developed or under current development, would have to respect some compatibility or compliance with the metadata models in use. The purpose of this workshop is to draw attention to the specific problem of metadata models in the context of (semi)-automatic multimedia search

Studying Interaction Methodologies in Video Retrieval

So far, several approaches have been studied to bridge the problem of the Semantic Gap, the bottleneck in image and video retrieval. However, no approach is successful enough to increase retrieval performances significantly. One reason is the lack of understanding the user's interest, a major condition towards adapting results to a user. This is partly due to the lack of appropriate interfaces and the missing knowledge of how to interpret user's actions with these interfaces. In this paper, we propose to study the importance of various implicit indicators of relevance. Furthermore, we propose to investigate how this implicit feedback can be combined with static user profiles towards an adaptive video retrieval model

EsPRESSo: Efficient Privacy-Preserving Evaluation of Sample Set Similarity

Electronic information is increasingly often shared among entities without complete mutual trust. To address related security and privacy issues, a few cryptographic techniques have emerged that support privacy-preserving information sharing and retrieval. One interesting open problem in this context involves two parties that need to assess the similarity of their datasets, but are reluctant to disclose their actual content. This paper presents an efficient and provably-secure construction supporting the privacy-preserving evaluation of sample set similarity, where similarity is measured as the Jaccard index. We present two protocols: the first securely computes the (Jaccard) similarity of two sets, and the second approximates it, using MinHash techniques, with lower complexities. We show that our novel protocols are attractive in many compelling applications, including document/multimedia similarity, biometric authentication, and genetic tests. In the process, we demonstrate that our constructions are appreciably more efficient than prior work.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper was published in the Proceedings of the 7th ESORICS International Workshop on Digital Privacy Management (DPM 2012). This is the full version, appearing in the Journal of Computer Securit

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

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