Associative mining for intelligent organisation and analysis of multimedia information

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The overwhelming amounts of multimedia information generated in today's media-centric society present a host of challenges to end-users, businesses and researchers alike: quite simply, technologies for efficient organization, navigation and analysis cannot keep pace. Part of the problem is that consumption of media (browsing/analysis) would be far better served by building a pre-conceived notion of what constitutes an "interesting" event, and forcing the media collection to be organized around that, thereby promoting fast and relevant access. The problem of restructuring large media collections for non-linear access is not new, having provided much impetus for both content- and concept-based retrieval: the two core research fronts underpinning current state-of-the-art in video search. Such successes, however, are highly dependent on annotation, and it is becoming increasingly evident that collections are fast outgrowing our abilities to reliably annotate. Methodologies are desperately needed to automatically organize multimedia contents without the benefit of prior knowledge. This can be cast as a problem in unsupervised pattern or event "discovery", wherein an intrinsic representation of a media stream is sought as a basis for its reorganization. In light of recent advances in visual attention modeling, which considers the natural queues and responses that direct human visual/aural attention, we ask: is it possible that there exist certain intrinsic patterns or irregularities in multimedia data, that can more appropriately reflect natural mappings to semantic events? Specifically, the proposed research program will address event discovery by investigating the possible synergies between natural, self-organizing approaches to unsupervised learning and the visual attentive mechanisms that appear to significantly guide human interest. The generic scope of this research will result in the development of tools to serve a range of pressing deficiencies in the summarization, navigation and consumption of broadcast news, sports, TV and film production, meetings, personal lifelogs, eChronicles, media-centric management systems and PVR's, security and unmanned surveillance, biomedical image informatics and biometrics.