Relevance ranking in georeferenced video search

The rapid adoption and deployment of ubiquitous video cameras has led to the collection of voluminous amounts of media data. However, indexing and searching of large video databases remain a very challenging task. Recently, some recorded video data are automatically annotated with meta-data collected from various sensors such as Global Positioning System (GPS) and compass devices. In our earlier work, we proposed the notion of a viewable scene model derived from the fusion of location and direction sensor information with a video stream. Such georeferenced media streams are useful in many applications and, very importantly, they can effectively be searched via their meta-data on a large scale. Consequently, search by geo-properties complements traditional content-based retrieval methods. The result of a georeferenced video query will in general consist of a number of video segments that satisfy the query conditions, but with more or less relevance. For example, a building of interest may appear in a video segment, but may only be visible in a corner. Therefore, an essential and integral part of a video query is the ranking of the result set according to the relevance of each clip. An effective result ranking is even more important for video than it is for text search, since the browsing of results can only be achieved by viewing each clip, which is very time consuming. In this study, we investigate and present three ranking algorithms that use spatial and temporal properties of georeferenced videos to effectively rank search results. To allow our techniques to scale to large video databases, we further introduce a histogram-based approach that allows fast online computations. An experimental evaluation demonstrates the utility of the proposed methods.