PERSEUS: Personalized Multimedia News Portal

This paper describes the Perseus project, which is devoted to developing techniques and tools for creating personalized multimedia news portals. The purpose of a personalized multimedia news portal is to provide relevant information, selected from newswire sites on the Internet and augmented by video clips automatically extracted from TV broadcasts, based on the user’s preferences. To create such an intelligent information system several techniques related to textual information retrieval, audio and video segmentation, and topic detection should be developed to work in accord. The approaches to event mining and tracking on the Internet, commercial detection and recognition in video and audio streams, and selection of relevant news video fragments, based on closed captioning and audio transcripts, are described.