Videana: A Software Toolkit for Scientific Film Studies

Abstract

Within the research project “Methods and Tools for Computer-Assisted Media Analysis” funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, we have developed the software toolkit Videana to relieve media scholars from the time-consuming task of annotating videos and films manually. In this paper, we present the automatic analysis tools and the graphical user interface (GUI) of Videana. The following automatic video content analysis approaches are part of Videana: shot boundary detection, camera motion estimation, detection and recognition of superimposed text, detection and recognition of faces in a video, and audio segmentation. The GUI of Videana allows the user to subsequently correct erroneous detection results and to insert user-defined comments or keywords at the shot level. Furthermore, several research applications of Videana are discussed. Finally, experimental results are presented for the content analysis approaches and compared to the quality of human annotations.