Vitalas

VITALAS is a use-case driven project that aims at providing a pre-industrial prototype system dedicated to intelligent access services to multimedia professional archives that would provide the consumer with new technological functionalities. VITALAS system technology is envisaged to be a B2B tool which will develop technologies that could be applied and re-used for larger public consumer facing multimedia content search engines.

VITALAS will provide advanced solution for indexing, searching and accessing large scale digital audio-visual content. In this regard, the project will confront its technology to real use-cases reflecting the joint concerns of two major European content providers: INA and BELGA. In particular, two concrete use-cases will be considered: the first one addressing political/societal news content; the second covering fashion and entertainment news.

To this end, VITALAS will address three major challenges: i) the cross-media indexing (automatic annotation) and retrieval, ii) the large scale search techniques iii) visualisation and context adapting (personalized services considering both on-line and off-line). This implies the development of efficient and advanced informative content description methods, robust machine learning approaches towards automatic annotation and interactive content search. The methods to be developed will anticipate the on-line user needs (queries) by allowing advanced retrieval of non-previously annotated persons/objects through effective non-textual content description and automatic metadata generation.

The scalability issue of searching large scale index feature space will also be addressed, and intelligent visualization techniques will be developed for smart content navigation.

The end result of the project will be a pre-industrial search engine designed and validated by audiovisual professionals exhibiting functionalities that allow interactive indexing and semi-automatic annotation, with interactive and personalized access to large-scale multimedia content resources.

Consortium:

European Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics – ERCIM(Co-ordinator)
European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company – EADS DS
Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica – CWI
Fraunhofer
INRIA
Robotiker
INA
University of Sunderland
CERTH-ITI
Codeworks
BELGA
Institut fuer Rundfunktechnik – IRT