Retrieval of Commercials by Semantic Content: The Semiotic Perspective.

Video information processing and retrieval is a key aspect of future multimedia technologies and applications. Commercial videos encode several planes of expression through a rich and dense use of colors, editing effects, viewpoints and rhythms, which are exploited together to attract potential purchasers. Databases of commercials can be accessed in order to analyze how a commercial has been developed, retrieve commercials similar to an example, catalog commercials according to the kind of message conveyed to the user. In this paper, we present a system allowing the retrieval of commercial streams based on their salient semantics. Semantics is regarded from the semiotics perspective: collections of signs and semantic features like colors, editing effects, motion, etc. are used as basic blocks with which the meaning of a commercial is constructed. In our system, it is possible to retrieve commercials according to both the meaning they convey and to their similarity to examples.