Workshop on Frontiers in Image and Video Analysis

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

The bombing attacks at the Boston Marathon in April 2013 presented the law enforcement community with significant challenges in terms of the volume and variety of video and still images acquired in the course of the investigation. Tens of thousands of individual media files in multiple formats were submitted from a variety of sources. These sources included broadcast television feeds, private Close-Circuit Television (CCTV) systems, mobile device photographs and videos recovered from the scene, as well as photographs and videos submitted by the public. Teams of analysts reviewed this evidence using mostly manual processes to determine the sequence of events before and after the bombing, ultimately leading to a quick resolution of the case. In the aftermath, it has become evident that the proliferation of video and image recording devices in fixed and mobile devices make it inevitable that a similar situation will occur in future events. As a result, it is incumbent upon the law enforcement community and the U.S. Government at large to further explore the use of automated approaches, available today or in the coming years, to better organize and analyze such large volumes of multimedia data. The findings of this workshop will help define the future research agenda. The problem of searching for actionable intelligence information from unconstrained images and videos is an unsolved problem. Solving this involves addressing many sub-problems such as video summarization, shot detection/scene change detection, geo-tagging, robust face recognition, human action recognition, semantic description, image recognition and designing human in the loop systems. In addition, issues such as data collection and performance evaluation have to be addressed. Given that several hundreds of videos and a large collection of still images may be available for analysis, there is a great need to develop robust computer vision techniques. While many existing computer vision algorithms perform reasonable well in constrained acquisition conditions, their performance when unconstrained images and videos are given, is less than satisfactory. This workshop precisely addresses the challenges that arise in analyzing a large collection of unstructured image/video collection. This workshop explores the state of the art in algorithms being developed in academia that can support forensic analysis and identification in large volumes of images and videos (e.g., multimedia). The workshop informs long- and near-term research and development efforts aimed at optimally addressing this situation in the future. The workshop identifies those video and image analysis problems which are: (1) Considered solved (i.e., ready to deploy in specific operational scenarios); (2) Nearly solved (i.e., could lead to solutions with one to three years of development); and (3) Over-the-Horizon problems (i.e., those challenges requiring concerted effort over the next 3-5 years and beyond).