Commercial video retrieval by induced semantics

Video information processing and retrieval is a key challenge for future multimedia technologies and applications. Commercial videos encode several planes of expression through a rich and dense use of colors, editing effects, viewpoints and rhythms, which are exploited together to attract potential purchasers. In this paper, previous research in the marketing and semiotics fields is translated into a multimedia engineering perspective, and a link is formalized between visual features of commercials at the perceptual level and the specific information that is being vehiculated to the audience. The link allows us to define higher level semantic features capturing the main narrative structures of the video, and embed them in a video retrieval system supporting access to a database of commercials based on four different semiotic categories.