As in 2017,  the VBS 2018 will collaborate with TRECVID (in particular with the Ad-Hoc Video Search task) and use the same IACC.3 video data set (600h; please register for TRECVID or contact George Awad at NIST to get access to the data). There will be no restrictions in terms of allowed features (also Internet will be allowed), except for presentation screen recording during the competition, which is disallowed. That means in addition to interactive content search you can use any automatic content search as well.

The Video Browser Showdown (VBS) is an annual live video search competition, where international researchers evaluate and demonstrate the efficiency of their exploratory video retrieval tools on a shared data set in front of the audience. It is organized as a special session at the International Conference on MultiMedia Modeling (MMM) since 2012. In this special session the participating teams start with a quick presentation of their video search systems and then perform several video retrieval tasks with a moderately large video collection (about 600 hours of video content, also known as the IACC.3 data set used by TRECVID).

The aim of the Video Browser Showdown is to evaluate video browsing tools for their efficiency at “Known Item Search” (KIS)  and “Ad-hoc Video Search” (AVS) tasks with a well-defined data set in direct comparison to other tools. For each KIS task the searchers need to interactively find a single video clip (20 secs long) in the video collection within a specific time limit. For AVS tasks teams are required to find matching shots according to a text query (e.g., “Find all shots showing trees“). While the video data is distributed before the event, the tasks are presented on-site via a projector (either as a video clip itself, or as a textual description). The videos below show some impressions from previous events.

The next Video Browser Showdown (VBS2018) will be held at MMM 2017 on February 5-7, 2018 in Bangkok, Thailand.

See VBS2018 Call-for-Papers and the submission guidlines here.

The Video Browser Showdown was previously supported by the TOSCA-MP project by contributing to the organisation and providing data sets.