Semantic Understanding of Human Behaviors in Image Sequences: From video-surveillance to video-hermeneutics

Hermeneutics, defined as the art of interpreting a message, centered its study for many centuries in theorizing the interpretation process in written texts, mainly biblical ones. The appearance of the first recordings of image sequences during the last period of the 19th century expanded such a domain. The aesthetics of such videos was of interest in the early 20th century to great philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein since, in that new format of communication, cinematographic texts became an interpretation game in which the language film was articulated in a network of multiple readings.