ACTIVE, an Extensible Cataloging Platform for Automatic Indexing of Audiovisual Content

Abstract

The cost of manual metadata production is high, especially for audiovisual content, where a time-consuming inspection is usually required in order to identify the most appropriate annotations. There is a growing need from digital content industries for solutions capable of automating such a process. In this work we present ACTIVE, a platform for indexing and cataloging audiovisual collections through the automatic recognition of faces and speakers. Adopted algorithms are described and our main contributions on people clustering and caption-based people identification are presented. Results of experiments carried out on a set of TV shows and audio files are reported and analyzed. An overview of the whole architecture is presented as well, with a focus on chosen solutions for making the platform easily extensible (plug-ins) and for distributing CPU-intensive calculations across a network of computers.