Software can recognise events in online videos

Scientists developed a computer software that can recognise events in YouTube videos, even those that it has not previously seen.

The new approach uses both scene and object features from the video and enables associations between these visual elements and each type of event to be automatically determined and weighted by a machine-learning architecture known as a neural network.

The approach not only works better than other methods in recognising events in videos, but is significantly better at identifying events that that the computer programme has never or rarely encountered previously, said Leonid Sigal, senior research scientist at Disney Research. These events can include riding a horse, baking cookies or eating at a restaurant.

“Automated techniques are essential for indexing, searching and analysing the video being created and uploaded daily to the Internet,” said Jessica Hodgins, vice-president at Disney Research.

“With multiple hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every second, there’s no way to describe all of that content manually. And if we don’t know what’s in all those videos, we can’t find things we need and much of the videos’ potential value is lost,” she said.