Video Indexing by Face Occurrence-Based Signatures

The extraction of a digital signature from a video segment in order to uniquely identify it, is often a necessary prerequisite for video indexing, copyright protection and other tasks. Semantic video signatures are those that are based on high-level content information rather than on low-level features of the video stream, their major advantage being that they are invariant to nearly all types of distortion. Since a major semantic feature of a video is the appearance of specific people in specific frames, we have developed a method that uses the pre-extracted output of face detection and recognition to perform fast semantic indexing and retrieval of video segments. We give the results of the experimental evaluation of our method on an artificial database created using a probabilistic model of the creation of video