The characterization of a video segment by a digital signature is a fundamental task in video processing. It is necessary for video indexing and retrieval, copyright protection and other tasks. Semantic video signatures are those that are based on high-level content information rather than on low-level features of the video stream. The major advantage of such signatures is that they are highly invariant to nearly all types of distortion. A major semantic feature of a video is the appearance of specific persons in specific video frames. Because of the great amount of research that has been performed on the subject of face detection and recognition, the extraction of such information is generally tractable, or will be in the near future. We have developed a method that uses the pre-extracted output of face detection and recognition to perform fast semantic query-by-example retrieval of video segments. We also give the results of the experimental evaluation of our method on a database of ...
Costas I. Cotsaces, Nikos Nikolaidis, Ioannis Pita