Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval of Unedited Audio-Visual Footage

Unedited audio¿visual footage known as rushes shares many features with general¿purpose multimedia data, but it also shows special characteristics. Rushes are often single¿shot sequences at a single location, sparsely edited, with repetitive content and soundtrack is frequently irrelevant. This leads to additional challenges beyond the existing ones in multimedia indexing and retrieval. The joint effort of a number of research groups all over the world resulted in a ‘rushes exploitation’ task in the TRECVID video analysis international benchmark organized this year. In addition, the European FP6 project RUSHES is fully dedicated to research and development of a system for indexing, accessing and delivering raw, unedited audio¿visual footage and to enable indexing, search and retrieval of rushes archives to ease in¿house postproduction or reuse in a media professional environment. In this special session, latest research results on indexing, search and retrieval with focus on raw unedited audiovisual content are presented.