SRI-Sarnoff AURORA System at TRECVID 2013 Multimedia Event Detection and Recounting

In Multimedia Event Detection 2013 evaluation, SRI Aurora team participated in EK100, EK10, and EK0 tasks with full system evaluation. We submitted 15 runs for both pre-specified events (PS-Events) and ad-hoc events (AH-Events). The majority of them achieved satisfactory results. In particular, thanks to the well-designed concept features, our EK10 system works consistently much better for both PSEvents and AH-Events. By creating the concept language model from the web source, we build our EK0 system to perform event detection without training examples. This system achieved promising results on PS-Events. In MER task, we developed an approach to provide a breakdown of the evidences of why the MED decision has been made by exploring the SVM-based event detector. Furthermore, we designed evidence specific verification and detection to reduce uncertainty and improve key evidence discovery.