CIMWOS Features

Major features of the CIMWOS multimedia content management system include:

• Exploitation of multimodal, multimedia and multilingual information
• Indexing on image processing elements: faces, scene text, objects, video segments and keyframes, shots and subshots
• Indexing on speech processing elements: passages, speakers
• Indexing on text processing elements: words, terms, named entities, stories, topics
• Fully automated merging of multimodal metadata
• MPEG-7 compliant metadata
• XML-based indexing
• Alignment of indexes on time stamps
• Bibliographic XML indexing (media information)
• Advanced searching and browsing
• Weighted Boolean multimedia retrieval engine
• Combination of free query and metadata query
• Fast and efficient query execution
• Lexical analysis and stop lists
• Query normalisation for morphological variations
• Multilinguality: three European languages currently supported; architecture open for new languages to be included
• Browsing schema

The CIMWOS integrated environment has been revised and updated based on the first validation report and on general feedback provided by the user groups participating in the project. Aspects such as user interface functionality and general user-friendliness, system reliability, and robustness in terms of accuracy and performance have been thoroughly tested and documented.

An expert external reviewer for a CIMWOS deliverable has commented as follows: “In the archive domain, the BBC has a standard for indexing the in-house production: 8 hours of a documenter for each hour of a produced program. With the help of the CIMWOS tools, I believe that the work could be reduced to 4 hours. I think this could be enough and sufficient to convince a General Manager having about 120.000 hours to digitise that this project is of strategic importance.”

CIMWOS Potential

CIMWOS addresses real needs of multimedia producers, archivers, and others who need to monitor or index audiovisual content. Use intentions follow a two-pronged strategy:

• Marketing of individual processing components is foreseen according to individual model maturity, which can be integrated into existing products serving the multimedia sector.
• Pilot installation and use of the full system, including processing, archiving, and search/ retrieval, aims to attract investor interest for full development to commercial grade software.

Utilising the vast amounts of information accumulated in audio and video, the CIMWOS system can become an invaluable assistant in promoting the re-use of existing resources, cutting down the budgets for new productions. CIMWOS opens new possibilities and provides enabling technology for novel application areas and services.

With Internet continuing its rapid development and personal computers becoming more and more capable of handling and manipulating multimedia resources on-line content providing services are expected to grow rapidly. However, quality video requires large amounts of storage space and transmission bandwidth, inhibiting on-line circulation via the Internet. CIMWOS offers a viable solution by providing technologies to perform searches locally at the provider site and transmit the results in a compacted “preview” format. Thus, users can download solely the material that suits their specific needs. CIMWOS provides a fast way to assemble information on special areas of interest by exploiting existing archives and thus reducing the time-to-market for new multimedia titles.

CIMWOS can be employed to annotate and give access to large archives and to promote standardisation and unification of multiple depositories thus allowing the rise of multimedia digital libraries at the European level.

CIMWOS can improve the working conditions and the productivity of people involved in media and television, video, news broadcasting, show business, advertisement, and any organisation that produces, markets or broadcasts video and audio programmes, by facilitating common procedures of retrieving audiovisual material. Moreover, it can provide distinct advantages in terms of time-to-market, material reusability, and resource reallocation.

Facilitating access to relevant high-quality information, the CIMWOS system may also become an invaluable assistant for educational purposes delivering the right information at the right time. Being aligned with the ongoing large-scale investment in developing multimedia information systems funded within the European or national framework or by the private sector, the value of CIMWOS may increase further in the future.