A Distributed Automatic Video Annotation Platform

Abstract

In the era of digital devices and the Internet, thousands of videos are taken and share through the Internet. Similarly, CCTV cameras in the digital city produce a large amount of video data that carry essential information. To handle the increased video data and generate knowledge, there is an increasing demand for distributed video annotation. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel distributed video annotation platform that explores the spatial information and temporal information. Afterward, we provide higher-level semantic information. The proposed framework is divided into two parts: spatial annotation and spatiotemporal annotation. Therefore, we propose a spatiotemporal descriptor, namely, volume local directional ternary pattern-three orthogonal planes (VLDTP–TOP) in a distributed manner using Spark. Moreover, we developed several state-of-the-art appearance-based and spatiotemporal-based feature descriptors on top of Spark. We also provide the distributed video annotation services for the end-users so that they can easily use the video annotation and APIs for development to produce new video annotation algorithms. Due to the lack of a spatiotemporal video annotation dataset that provides ground truth for both spatial and temporal information, we introduce a video annotation dataset, namely, STAD which provides ground truth for spatial and temporal information. An extensive experimental analysis was performed in order to validate the performance and scalability of the proposed feature descriptors, which proved the excellence of our proposed approach.