Media Management Webinar 2022 on May 12^th online, free access.

Face recognition at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision – Is it really Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?

NISV implemented speaker detection and thesaurus label term extraction in 2015 to reduce time spent on manual annotation and to increase the amount of structured and fine-grained access points for media professionals (the broadcasters) in our daily ingested programs. In 2019 face recognition has been thrown into the mix, trying to make automatic annotation “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”. Two years later, it’s time to check the status: how well does it work, what’s the quality and quantity, what do our users think about it, what about the challenges on both technological and ethical aspects, and how does NISV apply it compared to other archives that might have similar challenges.

INA Facial recognition: Trombinos

We introduce Trombinos, a face database management system. Thanks to its integrated face recognition model, it allows the user to navigate, cure and expand a large-scale dataset of faces efficiently. The database contains both face images from archived french TV shows and face images obtained through image search engines. It already contains 62 million identified faces belonging to 70 thousand individuals and 540 million faces yet to be identified. Trombinos helps users to efficiently navigate this database, recognize someone based on a picture, retrieve their occurrences amongst the archived TV shows based on their name, and manually enrich or correct the existing annotations. Our system facilitates human-machine interaction; by identifying similar-looking faces, Trombinos allows users to validate them by batch and annotate many faces easily. Furthermore, Trombinos learns from the users’ feedback to improve its face recognition performances in real-time, and in turn to facilitate the future annotations of the user in a virtuous circle. Using Trombinos, a single user can easily assign hundreds of thousands of faces to their correct identities in just a few minutes. While still in continuous development, Trombinos is already used regularly by 5 users at INA to annotate the database.

A look back at the use of facial recognition and other AI techniques at the RTS

AI was introduced and used at RTS for automatic metadata extraction a few years ago. This presentation is an opportunity to look back at some of these tools, particularly facial recognition and visual search, and to discuss their impact on processes and changing practices.