"TIB AV Analytics" -- Development of a software platform for systematic film and video analysis

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Ralph Ewerth; Dr. Roman Mauer; Margret Plank
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics ; Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442397862

The proposed interdisciplinary project involves media and computer scientists and aims at developing a web-based film analytics platform which supports media and film studies and other domains in systematic film and video analysis. This includes the development of state-of-the-art software tools for automatic video analysis as well as adapted approaches for information visualisation. The proposed platform "TIB AV Analytics" is supposed to extend the AV-Portal of the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB). While the current platform allows for the search of scientific videos, systematic scientific video and film analysis are not supported. As a result, the project will support researchers who rely on systematic film and video analysis by offering an open platform featuring state-of-the-art algorithms and specific visualisations for the interpretation of narrative structures. The developed software components for graphical user interaction, novel algorithms for video analysis, and visualisation tools will furthermore be published open source and thus made available to interested parties for subsequent use. For the realisation of the project, we unite project partners with expertise in systematic film analysis from a media science perspective as well as automatic video analysis and visual analytics. The film scholars contribute with their domain knowledge to the requirements analysis, to the evaluation of the developed platform, and continuously accompany the technical development. The computer science partner accounted significantly for the development of the video analysis software Videana and researches video analysis and video retrieval system for several years.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Oksana Bulgakowa