User-generated metadata in audio-visual collections.

In recent years, crowdsourcing has gained attention as an alternative method for collecting video annotations. An example is the internet video labeling game Waisda? launched by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The goal of this PhD research is to investigate the value of the user tags collected with this video labeling game. To this end, we address the following four issues. First, we perform a comparative analysis between user-generated tags and professional annotations in terms of what aspects of videos they describe. Second, we measure how well user tags are suited for fragment retrieval and compare it with fragment search based on other sources like transcripts and professional annotations. Third, as previous research suggested that user tags predominately refer to objects and rarely describe scenes, we will study whether user tags can be successfully exploited to generate scene-level descriptions. Finally, we investigate how tag quality can be characterized and potential methods to improve it.