NewsRoom: recording, segmenting and indexing news for you to browse, search, find, read, listen and watch.

"Watch the news while I was away and tell me what happened."

NewsRoom is a modular platform for television broadcast news capture, automatic segmentation, indexing and browsing.

The core of NewsRoom is its automatic story segmentation software, which has been designed to combine "the best of all worlds". Its modular architecture allows to integrate various segmentation algorithms, organised in modules, such as a video scene detection software, lexical analysis algorithms, temporal feature analysis and high-level object-based audio/video feature extraction, such as optical character recognition and logotype detection. The segmentation modules can be easily added, modified or removed, and their integration can be weighted and time-constrained according to their individual performance.

NewsRoom also offers a web-based interface for news browsing and searching. Broadcast news are presented as individual stories and users are given the ability to view the stories in an annotated video, allowing nonlinear navigation in a similar way to chapters in DVD movies. A search engine can also be queried to retrieve news stories by topic and date.

Finally, users are offered through the web interface the ability to correct story segmentation manually, in case of errors by the automatic segmentation software. Story boundaries can be modified, added or deleted, giving to NewsRoom a community-based "wiki" flavour.

Quick start

This guide is to help you quickly try out the application, a more detailed user guide is available through the menu above.

The application is straightforward to use. It opens displaying the latest available news, split into stories. Each story is displayed in a panel with three components:

video key frames across the top, with a link to play the video in Matroska format (see note below)
key words down the left hand side, these are categorised into organisations, people, locations and dates
a central panel with a text summary of the story and a link to the full story.

Video files are chaptered, thus allowing to navigate through the various stories as you would do with DVD movies. The video format used is Matroska, therefore it is recommended to use a media player compatible with Matroska format, such as VLC media player. Codecs for other players are available on the Matroska website.

At the top of the main page there is a calendar to allow you to select and display previous days news. The search interface allows you to query the news archive by text, and an advanced search page allows you to search by date range. The text query searches the key words extracted from each story.

Application

This link -- NewsRoom -- will open the application in a new browser.