Content-based video retrieval in historical collections of the German Broadcasting Archive

The German Broadcasting Archive maintains the cultural heritage of radio and television broadcasts of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The uniqueness and importance of the video material fosters a large scientific interest in the video content. In this paper, we present a system for automatic video content analysis and retrieval to facilitate search in historical collections of GDR television recordings. It relies on a distributed, service-oriented architecture and includes video analysis algorithms for shot boundary detection, concept classification, person recognition, text recognition and similarity search. The combination of different search modalities allows users to obtain answers for a wide range of queries, leading to satisfactory results in short time. The performance of the system is evaluated using 2500 h of GDR television recordings.