Mex-Culture

Multimedia libraries indexing for the preservation and dissemination of the Mexican culture, 2012-2014

 Given the importance of cultural heritage content in promoting diversity in a globalized world, making this content quickly available to a broad audience is a critical issue. Large volumes of such content must be indexed and users must be provided with means for a fast and easy access to the multimedia information, making them able to browse (according to multiple criteria) and visualize desirable content stored in the archives. This requires automatic indexing, whose two main principles emerged in the early 1990s. First, the audiovisual content itself is used as basis for indexing. Second, content is processed in the compressed form in order to save the computational cost of decompressing the videos. The MEX-CULTURE project aims to:

1. Devise, with bilateral research efforts, new automated methods for large-scale processing and indexing of multimedia content. These methods concern video indexing directly performed on encoded visual content, audio indexing using descriptors issued from speech recognition and speaker identification, cross-media indexing (image, video, audio and speech), scalable search and retrieval. The resulting techniques will be implemented in a common development platform.
2. Support the preservation and dissemination of Mexican Culture by applying the methods devised in the project to the large databases of the FONOTECA NACIONAL (National Sound Archive of Mexico), part of CONACULTA (National Council for Culture and the Arts of Mexico) and the Video library (TVUNAM, more than 100,000 hours of video) of the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico). MEX-CULTURE is the first multimedia indexing project with these characteristics.

This project will be conducted by five organizations, three from France (CEDRIC-Cnam, LABRI and INA) and two from Mexico (UNAM, IPN) and it is jointly financed bu the ANR (France) and the CONACYT (Mexico).

Participants

CEDRIC

Michel Crucianu
Responsable

Marin Ferecatu

Andrei Stoian