Phylogeny reconstruction for misaligned and compressed video sequences

In the last few years, the amount of videos distributed online has dramatically increased due to the popularity of media sharing platforms (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo, etc.). However, distributed videos are often edited copies of original content, typically referred to as near duplicates. In this paper, we face the problem of reconstructing a video phylogeny tree, i.e., given a set of near-duplicate videos, we want to reconstruct the relationships between every pair of videos to detect which one generated the others and trace back their evolution history. Solving this problem is of paramount importance when the first published video within a set is sought, e.g., to solve copyright infringement cases or to pinpoint criminal impersonation online. The technique we propose exploits the same rationale of previous works in the field of image and video phylogeny. However, we embed in the commonly used pipeline of operations the possibility of dealing with temporally misaligned and encoded video sequences, thus making the method applicable to user-generated videos shared on online platforms. Results computed on a wide dataset of video sequences highlight the importance of taking care of both coding and misalignment in the reconstruction pipeline.