Exploiting captions in retrieval of multimedia data

Abstract

Descriptive natural-language captions can help organize multimedia data. We describe our MARIE system, which interprets English queries directing the retrieval of media objects. It is novel in the extent to which it exploits previously interpreted and indexed English captions for the media objects. Our routine filtering of queries through descriptively complex captions (as opposed to keyword lists) before retrieving data can actually improve retrieval speed, as media data are often bulky and time-consuming to retrieve and difficult upon which to perform content analysis, and even small improvements to query precision can often pay off. Handling the English of captions and queries about them is not as difficult as it might seem, as the matching does not require deep understanding, just a comprehensive type hierarchy for caption concepts. An important innovation of MARIE is “supercaptions” describing sets of captions, which can minimize caption redundancy.