Inferring semantics from structural annotations of audio-visual documents

In this paper, a new approach for semantic extraction is proposed. Assuming that the semantics of interest associated to a multimedia document is subjective and that the user cannot easily construct a semantic description on different abstraction levels, we propose an interactive tool which allows to generate a semantic description by organizing an audio-visual document. The structural decomposition is the result of a guided annotation by the user: the user segments the input sequence in events, assigns each event to a specific class and includes other informations such as time, place and contained objects. The classification process can evolve dynamically, which means that the user can organize the semantics with various personalized and more specialized classes. Using the resulting structural descriptions and classification, our method automatically generates a richer semantic description. The system is totally MPEG-7 complaint.