People Recognition - A Leapfrog in Organizing Videos

Google Tech Talks October 2, 2008 ABSTRACT Shifting from its initial purely entertainment-centric agenda, video is becoming an important media for communication, saving generic facts and personal memories. Viewdle is considering face recognition in real-life videos as one of the three material steps ahead (along with tracking location and timecodes) towards effective organization of videos. The presentation will focus on algorithmic and engineering approaches to address practical challenges of object recognition in low-resolution professional and user-generated videos. One of such approaches is multimodal fusion from several sources of information to achieve best-possible tagging and people-recognition-in-video experience. Viewdle outlines several key principles for "fusing" decisions from combination of heterogeneous sources such as video track, audio track (speech-to-text), OCR data (Optical Character Recognition). A real case of recognition in video taken by smartphone will be demonstrated. Viewdle presentation builds a bridge from generic problems of information retrieval in video to well-understood products such as video search/discovery, search engine optimization, and organization of mobile videos. Speaker: Viewdle Representative Viewdle is a facial-recognition based video indexing and search platform. It combines technology from video, audio, and text indexing to deliver a semantically accurate video search experience. Viewdle is looking inside every frame to identify and deliver factual, contextually-relevant results at a level of granularity not possible with existing video search tools. Viewdle launched in September 2007 at TechCrunch40 in San Francisco where it was one of the 40 presenters selected from 800+ startups Worldwide. Since then the company has expanded beyond white-label B2B offering to consumer-facing widgets and facebook application for organizing personal videos. Viewdle was a "Best Technology Innovation/Achievement" Crunchies 2007 Award finalist. The Company was also selected from among 45 contenders to be one of the eight presenting companies for Venture Night at the LIFT08 conference held in Geneva, Switzerland February 2008. Most recently Viewdle was named the 2008 Start-Up of the Year in Europe by the Plugg Conference. Viewdle technology is currently used by ThomsonReuters.