Sponsorship tracking using distributed multi-modal analysis (DIRECT-INFO)

DIRECT-INFO is a system for media monitoring currently applied to the field of sponsorship tracking. Significant parts of TV streams and electronic press feeds are automatically selected and subsequently monitored to find appearances of the name or logo of a sponsoring company in connection with the sponsored party. Basic features are automatically extracted from TV and press and thereafter fused to semantically meaningful results to support executive decision makers. Extracted features include detected logos, positive & negative mentions of a brand or product, multimodal video segmentation, speech-to-text transcripts and teletext subtitles, detected topics and genre classification. We first describe the technical workflow and architecture of the DIRECT-INFO system and then present its main innovations in the areas of logo detection, text analysis and fusion of results.