Multimodal indexing of digital audio-visual documents: A case study for cultural heritage data

This paper describes a multimedia multimodal information access sub-system (MIAS) for digital audio-visual documents, typically presented in streaming media format. The system is designed to provide both professional and general users with entry points into video documents that are relevant to their information needs. In this work, we focus on the information needs of multimedia specialists at a Dutch cultural heritage institution with a large multimedia archive. A quantitative and qualitative assessment is made of the efficiency of search operations using our multimodal system and it is demonstrated that MIAS significantly facilitates information retrieval operations when searching within a video document.