Using Detected Visual Objects to Index Video Database

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on how to use visual objects to index the videos. Two tables are constructed for this purpose, namely the unique object table and the occurrence table. The former table stores the unique objects which appear in the videos, while the latter table stores the occurrence information of these unique objects in the videos. In previous works, these two tables are generated manually by a top-down process. That is, the unique object table is given by the experts at first, then the occurrence table is generated by the annotators according to the unique object table. Obviously, such process which heavily depends on human labors limits the scalability especially when the data are dynamic or large-scale. To improve this, we propose to perform a bottom-up process to generate these two tables. The novelties are: we use object detector instead of human annotation to create the occurrence table; we propose a hybrid method which consists of local merge, global merge and propagation to generate the unique object table and fix the occurrence table. In fact, there are another three candidate methods for implementing the bottom-up process, namely, recognizing-based, matching-based and tracking-based methods. Through analyzing their mechanism and evaluating their accuracy, we find that they are not suitable for the bottom-up process. The proposed hybrid method leverages the advantages of the matching-based and tracking-based methods. Our experiments show that the hybrid method is more accurate and efficient than the candidate methods, which indicates that it is more suitable for the proposed bottom-up process.