The FIU team from Distributed Multimedia Information Systems (DMIS) Laboratory at the School of Computing and Information Sciences (SCIS) won the third place (third highest score) in the 2018 TRECVID Ad-hoc Video Search (AVS) competition (combining both fully-automated and manually-assisted tracks) among all the twenty-three registered teams around the world. Some of the recognized participants include Carnegie Mellon University, City University of Hong Kong, Hitachi, Ltd., Nanyang Technology University, National Institute of Informatics at Japan, National University of Singapore, Peking University, Tsinghua University, University of Amsterdam, University of Technology Sydney, and Waseda University.
TRECVID is one of the most famous international video retrieval competitions, conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and has held a total of 15 competitions taking place annually since the year 2003. The AVS task requests the participants to build a video retrieval system within a one-month period, capable of searching for thirty types of videos in a large-scale database. Each type of the videos is described by a query, such as “Find shots of a projection screen” and “Find shots of a truck standing still while a person is walking beside or in front of it.”
In this competition, the FIU team utilized the most recent advances in video processing and deep learning to understand the contents of the videos and submitted results that outperformed those of several recognized research groups. The development of this system can potentially promote the search engine’s capability to understand general descriptions of the video’s content without relying on user-created text metadata.
The team members from FIU include six graduate students from the DMIS lab (Samira Pouyanfar, Haiman Tian, Maria Presa Reyes, Hector Cen, Tianyi Wang, Yingxin Li) directed by Dr. Shu-Ching Chen, the Associate Director and Eminent Scholar Chaired Professor at SCIS. The team also worked together with students at the University of Miami for the competition.