Content-Based Multimedia Analytics : Rethinking the Speed and Accuracy of Information Retrieval for Threat Detection

Member nations of the NATO Alliance are increasingly threatened by the global spread of terrorism, humanitarian crises/disaster response, and public health emergencies. These threats are informed and/or influenced by the unprecedented rise of information sharing technologies and practices, even in the most underprivileged nations. In this new information environment, agile data algorithms, machine learning software, and threat alert mechanisms must be developed to automatically create alerts and drive quick response. Yet these advanced technologies must be balanced with awareness of the underlying context to accurately interpret machine-processed indicators and warnings and recommendations; human involvement will always remain critical in the decision process. We describe one promising approach to this challenge that brings together information retrieval strategies from heterogeneous media sources and human assessment. These multimedia sources include text, video, and images. Our focus, content based information retrieval and multimedia analytics, involves the exploitation of multiple heterogeneous data sources to deliver timely and accurate synopses of data with information that can be combined with human intuition and understanding to develop a comprehensive worldview.