Examining Machine Learning as an alternative for scalable video analysis

Abstract: Video is a large part of today’s society where surveillance cameras represent the biggest source of big data, and real-time entertainment is the largest network traffic category. There is currently a large interest in analysing the contents of video where video analysis is mainly conducted by people. This increase in video has for instance made it difficult for professional editors to analyse movies and series in a scalable way, and alternative solutions are needed. The media technology company June, want to explore scalable alternatives for extracting metadata from video. With recent advances in Machine Learning and the rise of machine-learning-asa-service platforms, June wished more specifically to explore how these Machine Learning services can be utilised for extracting metadata from videos, and from it construct a summary regarding its contents. This work examined Machine Learning as an option for scalable video summarisation which resulted in developing and evaluating an application that utilised transcription, summarisation, and translation services to produce a text based summarisation of video. Furthermore to examine the services current state of affairs, multiple services from different providers were tested, evaluated and compared to each other. Lastly, in order to evaluate the summarisation services an evaluation model was developed. The test results showed that the translation services were the only service that produced good results. Transcription and summarisation performed poorly in the tests which renders the suggested solution of combining the three services for video summarisation as impractical.