Introduction

2005 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Broadcast News was developed by researchers at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida (USF), Tampa, Florida and the Multimodal Information Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It contains approximately 60 hours of English broadcast news video data collected by LDC in 1998 and annotated for the 2005 VACE (Video Analysis and Content Extraction) tasks. The tasks covered by the broadcast news domain were human face (FDT) tracking, text strings (TDT) (glyphs rendered within the video image for the text object detection and tracking task) and word level text strings (TDT_Word_Level) (videotext OCR task).

The VACE program was established to develop novel algorithms for automatic video content extraction, multi-modal fusion, and event understanding. During VACE Phases I and II, the program made significant progress in the automated detection and tracking of moving objects including faces, hands, people, vehicles and text in four primary video domains: broadcast news, meetings, street surveillance, and unmanned aerial vehicle motion imagery. Initial results were also obtained on automatic analysis of human activities and understanding of video sequences.

Three performance evaluations were conducted under the auspices of the VACE program between 2004 and 2007. The 2005 evaluation was administered by USF in collaboration with NIST and guided by an advisory forum including the evaluation participants.

LDC has previously released:

• NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program -- Meeting Data Training Set Part 1 LDC2011V01
• NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program -- Meeting Data Training Set Part 2 LDC2011V02
• NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program -- Meeting Data Test Set Part 1 LDC2011V03
• NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program -- Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 LDC2011V04
• 2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program -- Meeting Data Test Set Part 1 LDC2011V05
• 2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program -- Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 LDC2011V06

This release is distributed on an external hard drive, consult these instructions for help attaching and reading the drive.

Data

The broadcast news recordings were collected by LDC in 1998 from the following sources: CNN Headline News (CNN-HDL) and ABC World News Tonight (ABC-WNT). CNN HDL is a 24-hour/day cable-TV broadcast which presents top news stories continuously throughout the day. ABC-WNT is a daily 30-minute news broadcast that typically covers about a dozen different news items. Each daily ABC-WNT broadcast and up to four 30-minute sections of CNN-HDL were recorded each day. The CNN segments were drawn from that portion of the daily schedule that happened to include closed captioning.

The broadcasts were captured directly from a cable TV connection. The signal first went to a VCR which was programmed to record the broadcast on VHS tape. These were later recorded in MPEG-2 (29.97 fps at 720 x 480p) for use in the VACE program. The MPEG-2 versions are contained in this release.

Tools

The VACE evaluation tools have been integrated into NIST's downloadable Framework for Detection Evaluation (F4DE) Toolkit. The toolkit contains small example files for each of the task/object/domain scoring combinations.

Samples

• Video
• Reference

Updates

None at this time.

Content Copyright

Portions © 1998 American Broadcasting Company, © 1998 Cable News Network, LP, LLLP, © 2012 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania