• Based on the collection of documentaries of the Russian State Film & Photo Document Archive

• The greatest collection of silent and sound newsreels and other documentaries representing the history of Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union

• About 215,000 units (boxes with films) produced in Russia, USSR, and some other countries)

June 1999

Digital Library

“Cinema Chronicle of Russia”

•

Digital Library

“Cinema Chronicle of Russia”

• To store a collection of documentaries• To provide the digitized video library for effective and easy access by its users

Project Project Objectives

Target Target Audience

• Citizens of the former Soviet Union• Students and researchers• Program producers• Emigrants and interested others living

outside Russia

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“Cinema Chronicle of Russia”Project Stages

1. To create a digital Russian/ English catalogue database About 10,000 film descriptions stored in the full-text database are already accessible on the Internet and on CD-ROM

Query facilities

Search by title, authors, subject, and other text information associated with films

2. To develop a digital library Full content-based video retrieval

Video Content

Human-provided metadata: content description, title, authors, technical parameters, and other textual data (may be taken from montage sheets, if they exist)

Speech

Captions

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“Cinema Chronicle of Russia”

TextualTextual ContentContent VisualVisual ContentContentVisual features

Domain objects

AudioAudio ContentContentBackground music

Laugh

Noise

Silence

and the like

… from various sources

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“Cinema Chronicle of Russia”Tools for Visual Content Definition

Segmentation of video stream

Visual features computation

Video content description in terms of visual features

Domain object detection

Object identification

Video visual content description in terms of

domain objects

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“Cinema Chronicle of Russia”

Color:- color histogram- color sets

Visual Features Computation

Shape:- bounding contours extraction- the Fourier transform of the contour curvature and of the distance between the contour points and the center of the figureTexture:- characteristics of a gray level cooccurence matrix- Gabor functions

Motion: optical flow

Uniform regions extracted by localization of the close gray values

Source video stream V(x,t)=(u(x,t),v(x,t))

Two dimensions of optical flow velocity:

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“Cinema Chronicle of Russia”

Optical flow method

Motion detectors

Computation of visual features (including motion-based features)

Program determining object’s presence or absence detects visual features specific for domain object

Object Detection in Video

The idea is to use information about motion not available in static images

Pixel-by-pixel comparison method

V(x,t)=(u(x,t),v(x,t))

Source

Person / Human Face Detection

The first step of image investigation is correction of illumination defects, contrast enhancement, etc.

Inspected area may be restricted to the regions first extracted by motion detector or by skin color detector

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“Cinema Chronicle of Russia”

In the project, object of the most interest is a person (or,at least, a human face).

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“Cinema Chronicle of Russia”Integrated Use of Comprehensive

Representation of Video ContentApplying the narrative content knowledge to the problem

of visual content understandingObject identification based on the interpretation of the corresponding text annotations

… for Various Tasks

Knowledge about frames containing pictures of certain persons, about their size and location, etc.

Organizing access to information based on: data of any represented type full content representation (a composite query)

Intelligent segmentation of a video stream: for indexing for search results representation

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“Cinema Chronicle of Russia”Optical Flow Method

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“Cinema Chronicle of Russia”Bounding Contours Extraction

-description-00:21Title “Happy Children of Country of Socialism”. Episode 1.Close up of picture of Stalin with a childs. Shots of people crowding at exhibition. Children look at exhibits. Close-ups of their faces and guide who explains.Episode 2.Hoisting of a flag. A young pioneer (children) summer camp in the morning. Children are swimming in the Gaskon river. Children are drawing, playing draughts, dance round dances. Close up of entrance and general shot of Park for children in the Soviet far Eastern city of Khabarovsk. A tutor is swinging ham-mocks with kids. Children play with baby bear, they dance, play harmonica. Close ups of kids’ faces.03:12Title - “Amateur Performances of Red Navy Sailors”.Title - “Red Navy Ensemble”. A performance of a group of Red Navy seamen in white uniform. Close ups of their faces.

-number- 3002-type- film magazine-title- “Union’s Film Magazine” N 39-year- 1938-studio- Union’s Newsreel-country- USSR-language- Russian-parts- 1-time- 11:41-color- black/white-sound- talking-format- 35mm-origin- positive-directors- —-camera- F.Pechul, G.Simonov (00:21); G.Ostrovsky (03:06); Barbutly, V.Sobovoy (05:02);M.Livshitz, O.Samutsevich, N.Lytkin (06:55); G.Simonov, R.Solovyev (10:12)-subject- Exhibition of Children’s Technical and Agricultural Achievements; Amateur performances of Red Navy Sailors. Rally for sailors of the MS “Smidovich” team; In summer military camp; “Prominent People of Our Country” - M.N.Mazai;

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“Cinema Chronicle of Russia”

Catalogue