Amplifying Video Information-Seeking Success through Rich, Exploratory Interfaces

Years of international participation and collaboration in TRECVID have shown that interactive multimedia systems, those with a user in the search loop, have consistently outperformed fully automated systems. Interface capabilities like querying by text, by image, and by semantic concept and storyboard layouts have led to significant performance improvements on provided search tasks. Lessons learned for TRECVID shot-based video retrieval are presented. In the real world, however, video collection users may focus on story threads instead of shots, or may not be provided with a clear stated search task. The paper also discusses users facing situations where they lack the knowledge or contextual awareness to formulate queries and having a genuine need for exploratory search systems supporting serendipitous browsing. Interfaces promoting various views for navigating complex information spaces can help with exploratory search and investigation into video corpora ranging from documentaries to broadcast news to oral histories. Work is presented using The HistoryMakers oral history archive as well as TRECVID international broadcast news to discuss the utility of various query and presentation mechanisms emphasizing people, time, location, and visual attributes. The paper leads into a discussion of how exploratory interfaces for video extend beyond storyboards, with a series of user studies referenced as empirical data in support of the presented conclusions.