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Automatic Movie Content Analysis

The MoCA Project


The MoCA Project

Overview


 

In 1994, an ambitious project in the multimedia domain was started at the University of Mannheim under the guidance of Prof. Dr. W. Effelsberg. We realized that multimedia applications using continuous media like video and audio data absolutely require access to semantic contents of these media types in a manner similar to that for textual and numerical data. Imagine a situation for textual media in which large digital collections of books, reports, articles etc. exist but nobody is able to search for pertinent keywords. Content analysis of continuous data, especially of video data, is currently based mainly on manual annotations. This implies that the searchable content is reduced to the annotated content, which usually does not contain the required information. The aim of the MoCA project is therefore to extract structural and semantic content of videos automatically.

During the past years, different applications have been implemented and the scope of the project has concentrated on the analysis of movie material such as can be found on TV, in cinemas and in video-on-demand databases. This has provided access to a great amount of input data for our algorithms. The algorithms developed for video and audio analysis thus concentrate on movie material. However, they are also applicable to general video and audio material.

Analysis features developed and used within the MoCA project fall into four different categories:

  1. features of single pictures (frames) like brightness, colors, text,
  2. features of frame sequences like motion, video cuts,
  3. features of the audiotrack like audio cuts, loudness and
  4. combination of features of the three classes to extract e.g. scenes.

The first two are usually regarded together and called video features. We have implemented a large number of well-known and new features in all categories. Details can be found in our publications