Archive Film Material – A Novel Challenge for Automated Film Analysis

Automated indexing and searching of videos has become an important requirement, due to the availability of large amounts of media in that form held, for example, by broadcasting companies, museums, and on the Internet. The field of content-based video retrieval focuses on the analysis of a video’s content, making it automatically searchable by computers. Typical tasks in video retrieval are the automated detection of shot boundaries and scene boundaries, and the detection of highlights. Most research in video retrieval focuses on particular types of video, such as news broadcasts, sports videos and commercials. Compared to the retrieval of these types of video content, the retrieval of film has received little attention by the research community. Archive films have been especially widely neglected in content-based retrieval. The automated analysis of archive films is more difficult than the analysis and retrieval of contemporary video and film material for several reasons. First, archive film is usually black and white, and thus color information cannot be exploited by automated analysis techniques. Second, archive film material usually has a lower material quality due to its old age, which impedes automated analysis. Third, archive film may exhibit stylistic aspects that are very different from contemporary material. We have participated in the interdisciplinary research project Digital Formalism that focused on the automated analysis and retrieval of historic film material. The project was a joint-effort between film scholars, archivists, and computer scientists. The project partners were the Department for Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the Vienna University, the Austrian Film Museum, and the Interactive Media Systems Group at the Vienna University of Technology.