Videana: A Software Toolkit for Scientific Film Studies

Abstract

Within the research project "Methods and Tools for Computer-Assisted Media Analysis" funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, we have developed the software toolkit Videana to relieve media scholars from the time-consuming task of annotating videos and films manually. In this paper, we present the automatic analysis tools and the graphical user interface (GUI) of Videana. The following automatic video content analysis approaches are part of Videana: shot boundary detection, camera motion estimation, detection and recognition of superimposed text, detection and recognition of faces in a video, and audio segmentation. The GUI of Videana allows the user to subsequently correct erroneous detection results and to insert user-defined comments or keywords at the shot level. Furthermore, several research applications of Videana are discussed. Finally, experimental results are presented for the content analysis approaches and compared to the quality of human annotations.

Exploring the Usage of a Video Application Tool: Experiences in Film Studies

“…A number of operational video application showcases have been developed applying the underlying techniques of video content analysis; particularly related to movies such as MovieBrowser (Lehane et al, 2007), Videana (Ewerth et al, 2005), and a project at the INRIA (Ronfard, 2004). These works are among the many works that are novel and consider the technical perspective of the analysis (i.e., measuring Precision/Recall and accuracy).…”

Designing an Interface for a Digital Movie Browsing System in the Film Studies Domain

“…Such applications could provide richer interactions with larger data sets or archives for navigating and browsing video sequences. A number of work have been done utilizing the underlying techniques for video content analysis as described, for example, in [11][12] [13], and working systems have been developed particularly related to movies, such as MovieBrowser [1], Videana [6], and a project at the INRIA laboratory [7]. These are among the many research projects with mainly a technical perspective in demonstrating the use of content analysis techniques in the context of particular usage scenarios in mind.…”