VITALAS plans to deliver a reliable and efficient pre-industrial prototype, allowing intelligent access to multimedia professional archives.
The original VITALAS technology will not only be applied in B2B applications, but will also reach out for larger public adoption, by addressing consumers’ need for efficient and reliable multimedia content search engines.

In this perspective, VITALAS will address three major challenges:

1. Cross-media indexing (automatic annotation) and retrieval,
2. Large scale search techniques,
3. Visualisation and Context adapting (personalized services considering both on- and off-line).
   

The VITALAS achievement relies on the development of efficient and advanced informative content description methods, robust machine learning approaches towards automatic annotation and interactive content search.

Ultimately, the project will deliver a pre-industrial search engine designed and validated by audiovisual Professionals exhibiting functionalities that allow interactive indexing and semi-automatic annotation, with interactive and personalized access to large-scale multimedia content resources

Scientific and Technological Objectives

Strength and objectives of VITALAS system are relying on three core activities

1. Cross-media indexing and retrieval methods. Efficient cross indexing methods will be developed through semi-automatic multimedia content annotation using several media inputs. VITALAS will put forward appropriate probabilistic retrieval techniques. Advanced hybrid relevance feedback model will be investigated to provide better user target retrieval. Unlike many approaches developed in other ongoing projects, VITALAS will not consider ontology-based methods but machine learning methods together with the development of more informative new content description methods. VITALAS is among rare projects that consider all media inputs (visual, textual and audio)
    
2. Interactivity and Context adapting: considering the preliminary use-cases expressed by our content provider partners, adapting the search space to the user profile and providing interactive functionalities to control the results is highly expected. Interactive cartographies and video synthetic views should allow users to give feedback, analyse and manipulate the results according to the task being achieved. Off-line user profiles and on-line personalisation will be used also to provide more user satisfaction by expressing his subjective preference.
    
3. Search scalability issue: Technologies enabling search in very large and heterogeneous databases will be one of the main target challenges of VITALAS. The system validation will be performed on real and alive databases, up to 10,000 hours of television archives and several tens of millions of political/societal news content images.
    
4. Specification and Validation based on professional use-cases: The functionalities of VITALAS system will be specified and validated by major European multimedia content providers, in conjunction with the academic and the industrial partners of the project. Thanks to the important effort spent on this point, VITALAS expects relevant and usable technology at the end of the project. The evaluation issues will be carefully addressed by the definition and selection of test corpora, success criteria statement and external user trials. The principle of VITALAS is that such kind of professional usage validation is an essential milestone before an extension to mass market applications (general public). Both internal and vocational training will therefore be undertaken to bring the user community to interact with the VITALAS system.

The VITALAS functionalities will provide the core system and technologies for intuitive multimedia search engine services, currently facing strong technological bottleneck.
This technology could also be adapted to mobile platforms with further collaboration with partners having expertise in mobile technologies and networked systems.