The Semantic Pathfinder for Generic News Video Indexing

This paper presents the semantic pathfinder architecture for generic indexing of video archives. The pathfinder automatically extracts semantic concepts from video based on the exploration of different paths through three consecutive analysis steps, closely linked to the video production process, namely: content analysis, style analysis, and context analysis. The virtue of the semantic pathfinder is its learned ability to find a best path of analysis steps on a per-concept basis. To show the generality of this indexing approach we develop detectors for a lexicon of 32 concepts and we evaluate the semantic pathfinder against the 2004 NIST TRECVID video retrieval benchmark, using a news archive of 64 hours. Top ranking performance indicates the merit of the semantic pathfinder