Browsing for the National Dutch Video Archive

Pictures have always been a prime carrier of Dutch culture. But pictures
take a new form. We live in times of broad- and narrowcasting through
Internet, of passive and active viewers, of direct or delayed broadcast,
and of digital pictures being delivered in the museum or at home. At the
same time, the picture and television archives turn digital. Archives are
going to be swamped with information requests unless they swiftly adapt to
partially automatic annotation and digital retrieval. Our aim is to provide
faster and more complete access to picture archives by digital analysis.
Our approach consists of a multi-media analysis of features of pictures in
tandem with the language that describes those pictures, under the guidance
of a visual ontology. The general scientific paradigm we address is the
detection of directly observables fused into semantic features learned from
large repositories of digital video. We use invariant, natural-image
statisticsbased contextual feature sets for capturing the concepts of
images and integrate that as early as possible with text. The system
consists of a large for science yet small for practice set of visual
concepts permitting the retrieval of semantically formulated queries. We
will demonstrate a PC-based, off-line trained state of the art system for
browsing broadcast news-archives.