NICTA, Microsoft team to smarten up video search

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 08 February 2011 11:31

NICTA and Microsoft Research Asia are collaborating to improve video search by applying surveillance technology.

NICTA is looking to apply video technology developed for surveillance purposes to video search engines in a joint project with Microsoft Research Asia.

"We want to find the best way for computers to sort and recognise actions in videos," said Dr Jian Zhang, project leader at NICTA. "NICTA has technology that recognises and models video-based action, which we developed for automation of video surveillance systems. In this new project, we are exploring the application of this technology to online video search so that search engines can deliver more accurate, faster results."

The idea is to algorithmically map 'action words' from titles and transcripts to segments within the videos.

Microsoft Research Asia will provide research funding for the project, which will use video metadata generated by Microsoft.

"This is the first such project between Microsoft Research Asia and NICTA. It will see close collaboration between the researchers in the MSRA Computing group led by Dr Shipeng Li and a team of NICTA researchers led by Dr Jian Zhang," said John Warren, university relations manager at Microsoft Research Asia.