Person search made easy

In this study, we present a method to extensively reduce the number of retrieved images and increase the retrieval performance for the person queries on the broadcast news videos. A multi-modal approach which integrates face and text information is proposed. A state-of-the-art face detection algorithm is improved using a skin color based method to eliminate the false alarms. This pruned set is clustered to group the similar faces and representative faces are selected from each cluster to be provided to the user. For six person queries of TRECVID2004, on the average, the retrieval rate is increased from 8% to around 50%, and the number of images that the user has to inspect are reduced from hundreds and thousands to tens. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.