Large-scale near-duplicate web video search: Challenge and opportunity

The massive amount of near-duplicate and duplicate Web videos has presented both challenge and opportunity to multimedia computing. On one hand, browsing videos on Internet becomes highly inefficient for the need to repeatedly fast-forward videos of similar content. On the other hand, the tremendous amount of somewhat duplicate content also makes some traditionally difficult vision tasks become simple and easy. For example, annotating pictures can be as simple as recycling the tags of Internet images retrieved from image search engines. Such tasks, of either to eliminate or to recycle near-duplicates, can usually be achieved by the nearest neighbor search of videos from Internet. The fundamental problem lies on the scalability of a search technique, in face of the intractable volume of videos which keep rolling on the Web. In this paper, we investigate scalability of several well-known features including color signature and visual keywords for Web-based retrieval. Indexing these features based on embedding technique for scalable retrieval is also presented. On an Internet video dataset of more than 700 hours collected during years 2006 to 2008, we show some preliminary insights to the challenge of scalable retrieval.