Open video: A framework for a test collection

The future will bring widespread access to large digital libraries of video. Consequently, a great deal of research is focused on methods of browsing and retrieving digital video. This type of work requires that investigators acquire and digitize video for their studies since the video information retrieval community does not yet have a collection of video for research purposes. There is a clear need for a shared test collection that they can use. This paper provides a framework for such a test collection and describes the Open Video Project that has begun to develop a test collection based on this framework. The proposed test collection is meant to be used to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for creating surrogates for video content or interfaces that display result sets from queries. An important challenge in developing such a collection is storing and distributing video objects. This paper is meant to lay out video management issues that may influence distributed storage solutions. More specifically, this paper describes the first phase for creating the test collection, sets guidelines for building the collection, and serves as a basis for discussion to inform subsequent phases and invite research-community involvement.