Content-based video copy detection using multimodal analysis

Huge and increasing amount of videos broadcast through networks has raised the need of automatic video copy detection for copyright protection. Recent developments in multimedia technology introduced content-based copy detection (CBCD) as a new research field alternative to the watermarking approach for identification of video sequences. This thesis presents a multimodal framework for matching video sequences using a three-step approach: First, a high-level face detector identifies facial frames/shots in a video clip. Matching faces with extended body regions gives the flexibility to discriminate the same person (e.g., an anchor man or a political leader) in different events or scenes. In the second step, a spatiotemporal sequence matching technique is employed to match video clips/segments that are similar in terms of activity. Finally the non-facial shots are matched using low-level visual features. In addition, we utilize fuzzy logic approach for extracting color histogram to detect shot boundaries of heavily manipulated video clips. Methods for detecting noise, frame-droppings, picture-in-picture transformation windows, and extracting mask for still regions are also proposed and evaluated. The proposed method was tested on the query and reference dataset of CBCD task of TRECVID 2008. Our results were compared with the results of top-8 most successful techniques submitted to this task. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs better than most of the state-of-the-art techniques, in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.