Roberto Borgotallo

ANTS: A Complete System for Automatic News Programme Annotation Based on Multimodal Analysis

This paper describes an integrated system for the acquisition, automatic annotation and Web publication of television broadcast news programmes named ANTS (automatic newscast transcription system). The system consists of several analysis components integrated in a unified architecture. Users have the possibility to access a large daily-growing database of news stories from the main national channels, all identified, categorised and published in a fully automatic way. The system identifies story boundaries, extracts texts from spoken content, classifies stories by subject and links external relevant information coming from the Web. Performances of the system have been evaluated in a real-life scenario, by providing an instance of the system to a panel of professional users inside RAI. The strength of the approach behind ANTS consists in the ability to integrate several heterogeneous analysis components in a performant and ready-for-production environment, capable of elaborating many hours of material per day without significant service drops and with sufficiently good accuracy for industrial employment in large broadcasting facilities.

Hyper Media News: a fully automated platform for large scale analysis, production and distribution of multimodal news content

This paper describes Hyper Media News (HMNews), a system for the automated aggregation and consumption of information streams from digital television and the Internet. TV newscasts are automatically segmented, annotated and indexed. Such information is then integrated with those available from Internet blogs, newspapers and press agencies. The end result is a set of innovative information services that supplies retrieval, recommendation and browsing of multi-modal news items across different production paradigms, ranging from traditional professional media, e.g. television and press, to new user-centric media platforms such as social networking sites, internet forums and blogs.

An automatic indexing system for television newscasts

The demonstration will be about an integrated system for the acquisition, automatic annotation and Web publication of television broadcast news programmes named ANTS (Automatic Newscast Transcription System). The system consists of several analysis components integrated in a unified architecture. Users have the possibility to access a large daily-growing database of news stories from the main national channels, all identified, categorised and published in a fully automatic way. The system identifies story boundaries, extracts texts from spoken content, classifies stories by subject and links external relevant information coming from the Web. ANTS integrates several heterogeneous analysis components in a performant and ready-for-production environment, capable of elaborating many hours of material per day without significant service drops and with sufficiently good accuracy for industrial employment.

Automated Visual Quality Analysis for Media Production

Automatic quality control for audiovisual media is an important tool in the media production process. In this paper we present tools for assessing the quality of audiovisual content in order to decide about the reusability of archive content. We first discuss automatic detectors for the common impairments noise and grain, video breakups, sharpness, image dynamics and blocking. For the efficient viewing and verification of the automatic results by an operator, three approaches for user interfaces are presented. Finally, we discuss the integration of the tools into a service oriented architecture, focusing on the recent standardization efforts by EBU and AMWAs Joint Task Force on a Framework for Interoperability of Media Services in TV Production (FIMS).

Performance evaluation of media segmentation heuristics using non-Markovian multi-class arrival processes

In the current scenario of a multitude of digital audiovisual sources it is valuable to set up systems capable to automatically analyze, classify and index the material for further usage. In this paper we propose a technique to study the performance of a system for the automatic segmentation of a particular kind of television program: television news. In the analyzed system, the segmentation is performed thanks to a set of heuristics that have to be tailored for the particular program structure they are working on.We model the bulletin broadcasts as non-Markovian multi-class arrival processes and we generate newscasts as their constituting parts. We exploit this model to simulate and study the effects of two different heuristics on two different possible newscast structures. This model allows us to avoid a long and expensive manual annotation. The evaluation of the output segmentation is performed automatically using a specifically defined metric.

Personalized Semantic News: Combining Semantics and Television

The integration of semantic technologies and television services is an important innovation in traditional broadcasting in order to improve services delivered to end users in an extended home environment: new methods emerge for getting TV content via the Web and interacting with TV content on end users devices. This paper gives a short description of a Personalized Semantic News scenario in the context of the NoTube project illustrating the use of semantics for personalized filtering and access of news items.