VERGE: An Interactive Search Engine for Browsing Video Collections Anastasia Moumtzidou 1 , Konstantinos Avgerinakis 1 , Evlampios Apostolidis 1 , Vera Aleksic 2 , Fotini Markatopoulou 1 , Christina Papagiannopoulou 1 , Stefanos Vrochidis 1 , Vasileios Mezaris 1 , Reinhard Busch 2 , Ioannis Kompatsiaris 1 1 Information Technologies Institute/Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, 6th Km. Xarilaou - Thermi Road, 57001 Thermi-Thessaloniki, Greece {moumtzid, koafgeri, apostolid, markatopoulou, cppapagi, stefanos, bmezaris, ikom}@iti.gr 2 Linguatec Sprachtechnologien GmbH, Gottfried-Keller-Str. 12, 81245 München {v.aleksic, r.busch}@linguatec.de Abstract. This paper presents VERGE interactive video retrieval engine, which is capable of searching and browsing video content. The system integrates sev- eral content-based analysis and retrieval modules such as video shot segmenta- tion and scene detection, concept detection, clustering and visual similarity search into a user friendly interface that supports the user in browsing through the collection, in order to retrieve the desired clip. 1 Introduction This paper describes VERGE interactive video search engine 1 , which is capable of retrieving and browsing video by integrating different indexing and retrieval modules. VERGE supports the Known Item Search task, which requires the incorporation of techniques for browsing and navigation within a video collection. VERGE was evalu- ated with participation in workshops and showcases such as TRECVID and VideOlympics, where it was shown to significantly improve user search experience over single or fewer search modalities. Specifically, VERGE demonstrated the best results in the interactive known item search of TRECVID 2011 by achieving a Mean Inverted Rank of 0.56, while the concept detectors of VERGE achieved good balance between detection accuracy (e.g. 15.8% MXinfAP for TRECVID 2013) and low computational complexity. The proposed version of VERGE aims at participating to the KIS task of the Video Browser Showdown (VBS) Competition [1]. In this context, VERGE supports inter- active searching of a known video clip in a large video collection by incorporating content-based analysis and interactive retrieval techniques. In the next sections we present the content-based analysis and retrieval techniques supported by VERGE, as well as the interaction with the user. 1 More information and demos of VERGE are available at: http://mklab.iti.gr/verge/ Proc. 20th Int. Conf. on MultiMedia Modeling (MMM'14), Dublin, Ireland, LNCS vol. 8326, pp. 411-414, January 2014. The final publication is available at link.springer.com