Search, Browse, Connect – Explore Media Archives now
,You ever wondered how to make a visual search in a video? You would like to look for a particular person, a well-known politician or a person of contemporary history? You need to find a particular object such as a car, a house or a building? If you currently want to make these kinds of searches on your video collection, you may have a hard time. Use AXES!
AXES is a tool resulting from a recently-ended European research project. It lets you search in audiovisual archives with a number of advanced visual search and detection technologies such as face recognition, visual category search and instance search. In addition, it provides various advanced audio tools including automatic speech and speaker recognition (ASR). Now you can search for spoken language, such as the famous statement "Ich bin ein Berliner" from Kennedy's visit in Berlin back in the '70s. AXES finds it through ASR and will directly lead you to the starting sequence. You don't even need to fast forward!
You have vast amounts of audiovisual content, but are lacking the resources to label and annotate them with metadata? AXES developed a range of novel technology components for generating these labels automatically and to put them in practical application scenarios, addressing audiovisual search optimisation (combined audio and visual search) and recommendation systems. Moreover, AXES is a self-learning system. Users can search for any term in any language and are not restricted to a thesaurus. If users insert a query such as 'horn rimmed glasses' and the system does not have a model for that concept, the tool will consult the Internet to learn what 'horn rimmed glasses' are and use that knowledge to search the video archive.
**You are a journalist, a researcher, a broadcast professional or a consumer? **AXES comes in three flavours reflecting the different needs of the targeted groups.
AXES PRO for media professionals
AXES built a system that specifically focuses on the re-use of archival material: AXES-Pro. One of the main topics evaluated for this prototype was how speech search and visual search could help professionals to find clips for new productions.
The general conclusion of various evaluations was that innovative search approaches increase the amount of search options and improve access to the long tail of archives.
AXES RESEARCH for journalists and researchers
Researchers and journalists are specific user groups of archive material. They primarily use the archive to investigate a topic or hypothesis.
For both user groups, having advanced audiovisual search tools available was a new and welcome experience. Interestingly, playing with the AXES tools stimulated the discussion on exploring content based on 'narratives' (e.g. storytelling). An online demo of the AXES RESEARCH system is available here.
AXES HOME for consumers
Consumers are an important audience for archives. For this target group the system has been optimised to run on a mobile device such as a tablet. Users are invited to explore content using the advanced features made possible by the AXES audio and visual analysis tools.
An example of a novel access model is based upon the observation that archives should bring content to where the user is, instead of the traditional model that requires a user to come to the content (e.g. the website of the archive). AXES implements this by providing users with relevant content from the archives dynamically based on external sources such as newsfeeds, blogs and websites.
You want to use AXES right away for your own media archive?
Open AXES is an output of the AXES European project. It offers audiovisual content analysis technologies to navigate video archives and is based on open source components. Use Open AXES now. There also is a preview available (login/pwd: axes/axes).
For more information on the EU funded Project visit the AXES website.
