Automatic understanding of viewer’s impressions from images or video sequences is a very difficult task but an interesting theme for study. Therefore, more and more researchers have paid attention to this theme recently. To solve the issue various elemental features or techniques need to be used in a comprehensive manner, such as, the balance of color or contrast, composition, and object recognition. In addition, we might have to consider not only image features but also semantic features. This is a very challenging task!
The task NHK sets is “Where is Beauty?”, which aims at automatic recognition of beautiful scenes in broadcast programs. We entrust the definition of “beauty” to the participants. The important points of this task are “how beauty is defined” and “how to approach beauty”. We believe that this is a challenging task involving human’s emotional matter. We provide participants with 10 broadcast video programs that introduce beautiful landscapes in Japan. In addition, we provide participants with segmentation data that describes shot boundaries. Participants should automatically extract beautiful scenes from those video programs and submit the scenes that are ranked in terms of beauty.
Evaluation will be performed on the basis of originality and adequacy of proposed method. The reliability of the method and the degree of variety of beauty are also evaluated. In addition, if a short video that is created by the selected scenes is submitted, it will be included in the evaluation.
Input
- Broadcast video program “Japan’s Scenic Beauty ” (25 min x 10 programs)
- Video format: MPEG1 (704 x 480 pixels)
- Audio: MPEG Audio 44.1 kHz stereo 224 kbps (English)
- Shot boundary data (xml file)
Participants should first contact us for the data before submission. We provide a password to download the video programs only to those who signed our agreement form for handling the material data. They are only permitted to use those video programs for this task. If you are interested in this task, please contact us.
- Masaki Takahashi (takahashi.m-iu-AT-nhk.or.jp), Japan Broadcasting Corporation
- Masanori Sano (sano.m-fo-AT-nhk.or.jp), Japan Broadcasting Corporation
Output
- List of extracted beautiful scenes that were ranked in the top 10%
- The scenes should be described by the shot number that we provide or frame number and its duration
- Recommended:
- 1 to 2-minute short video that is composed of extracted beautiful scenes
Evaluation
Organizers will review the submitted papers and select presenters on the basis of the following criteria.
- Originality and adequacy of proposed algorithm
- Reliability and variety of submitted beautiful scenes
- Quality of the submitted short video (if submitted)
