CODAM is a collaborative project funded by Innovate UK in the area of video fingerprinting and visual search. Our partners in the project are the University of Surrey and Visual Atoms. The project aims to deliver a toolkit to track and identify footage in very large video archives. This could be of significant help to broadcasters who quickly need to find a piece of footage for legal reasons, or for programme makers who want to find shots of a particular object or scene.
Project from 2014 - 2016
The two search technologies we’re working with on this project allow different types of retrieval. Video fingerprinting allows you to quickly find identical or near-identical footage in an archive of hundreds of thousands of hours of content. This is useful if you need to know whether a particular video clip has ever been broadcast. One of the strengths of this technology is its robustness to modification. Even if a piece of footage has scrolling text overlaid on it or its frame rate/colour-balance has been changed it can still be accurately identified by the system. T
he second technology we’re exploring is visual search. This allows you to query a database for ‘similar’ content. For example, if you want to find footage of the Eiffel Tower you could upload a video clip of the Tower and the system will return footage that closely matches it, even if the new footage is shot from a different perspective. The project aims to overcome the three main challenges around this sort of content-matching technology. Firstly, there is the challenge of accuracy - you need to make sure the system delivers high quality, meaningful results. Secondly, there is the challenge of scale - getting systems like this to perform over hundreds of thousands (and ultimately millions) of hours of footage is a non-trivial task.
Thirdly, there is the issue of user experience - you need to design a system that is fast, adaptable and easy-to-understand. The project will complete in September 2016 with the aim of producing research results and a search product that the ±«Óãtv can use internally. Our partners aim to produce a suite of search tools for commercial usage by anyone with a large video archive they want. If you have any questions please feel free to contact us at irfs@bbc.co.uk
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- ±«Óãtv R&D - Using Algorithms to Understand Content
- ±«Óãtv R&D - Artificial Intelligence In Broadcasting
- ±«Óãtv R&D - Content Analysis Toolkit
This project is part of the Internet Research and Future Services section
This project is part of the Content Analysis Toolkit work stream
Project Team
Project Partners
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Internet Research and Future Services section
The Internet Research and Future Services section is an interdisciplinary team of researchers, technologists, designers, and data scientists who carry out original research to solve problems for the ±«Óãtv. Our work focuses on the intersection of audience needs and public service values, with digital media and machine learning. We develop research insights, prototypes and systems using experimental approaches and emerging technologies.