TRECVID 2007--Overview

The TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVID) 2007 represents the seventh running of a TREC-style (trec.nist.gov) video retrieval evaluation, the goal of which remains to promote progress in content-based retrieval from digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. Over time this effort should yield a better understanding of how systems can effectively accomplish such retrieval and how one can reliably benchmark their performance. TRECVID 2007 was funded by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). 54 teams (see Table 1 at the end of the paper) from various research organizations — 17 from Asia, 23 from Europe, 12 from the Americas, and 2 from Australia — participated in one or more of four tasks: shot boundary determination, high-level feature extraction, search (fully automatic, manually assisted, or interactive) or pre-production video (rushes) summarization. See Figure 1 for an overview of TRECVID’s evolution. In 2007 TRECVID began what sets out to be a 3-year cycle using new data sources, related to the broadcast news used in 2003-2006 but significantly different. Data for the search and feature tasks was about 100 hours of (MPEG-1) news magazine, science news, news reports, documentaries, educational programming, and archival video almost entirely in Dutch from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. About 6 additional hours of Sound and Vision data was used for the shot boundary task. The BBC Archive provided about 50 hours of “rushes” pre-production video material with natural sound, errors, etc. from several BBC dramatic series for use in the summarization task.