Informedia – Search and Summarization in the Video Medium

Abstract

The Informedia system provides "full-content" search and retrieval of current and past TV and radio news and documentary broadcasts. The system implements a fully automatic intelligent process to enable daily content capture, analysis and storage in on-line archives. The current library consists of approximately a 2,000 hours, 1.5 terabyte library of daily CNN News captured over the last 3 years and documentaries from public television and government agencies. This database allows for rapid retrieval of individual "video paragraphs" which satisfy an arbitrary spoken or typed subject area query based on a combination of the words in the soundtrack, images recognized in the video, plus closed-captioning when available and informational text overlaid on the screen images. There are also capabilities for matching of similar faces and images, generation of related map-based displays. The latest work attempts to produce a visualization and summarization of the content across all the stories in a large retrieval result set. These combined functions enable a time and bandwidth efficient navigation of the video space and provide a highly interactive and engaging experience for the user.