Video search
The latest Economist Technology Quarterly (free access for the moment) has a brief status on video search. Searching the image itself is very difficult, but there is a lot of activity in searching associated text: the closed captions, the audio portion (via speech recognition), and human or machine produced video metadata.
IBM has a test version of a more sophisticated analysis/retrieval engine called Marvel; after manually tagging 1-5% of a set of video content, the system learns to recognize the rest — this is a huge reduction of the expensive, error-prone human tagging effort. IBM’s web has good detail on the project. From those pages I learned about MPEG-7, which is a video metadata (rather than encoding) standard.
The ETQ acknowledges that business models are lacking, but singles out Critical Mention as one that is working; they offer web-based search and alert (”reputation management”) services for TV news. I see in the news last week that they now have a licensing agreement with AP (Associated Press) Digital.
Since it looks like metadata is playing a big role in video search, it should be interesting to see which producers/consumers are doing the tagging, and where the analysis and search logic resides. The big search engines are an obvious home, fancy services like CM are another, but why shouldn’t I also have something to find stuff on my computer or LAN?
August 22nd, 2006 at 02:24
Metadata is going to be an important component of video search for the forseeable future. Large media companies are waking up to this fact, though many continue to struggle with how to produce appropriate medatadata:
from a recent AP article …
“Just as Internet search engines such as AltaVista raced to index text on the Web in the mid-1990s, Google and Yahoo [and Searchforvideo.com] are now vying to create more comprehensive video search tools that make clips easily accessible through keywords.
That’s no small task, since each clip must be classified with right keywords for it to be found. Text searches scan the words of a document, while video searches must rely on the words attached to the file describing its contents. Executives say this strategy is one of the most important jobs for any company, large or small, wanting to get video on the Web.
“At the moment we’re putting most of our focus and energy into optimizing the search engines, because that’s 90 per cent of the way people find content,” said Kris Faibish, CTV’s vice-president of digital media.
“[The] strategies are about making sure that when Google crawls your site looking for keywords, you’ve set up your site properly and the keywords are there.”
Much of the video material making its way onto the Web isn’t being indexed properly, said Andy Renieris, manager of Yahoo Canada’s Web search products.