Human-based Video Browsing - Investigating Interface Design for Fast Video Browsing

The Video Browser Showdown (VBS) is an annual event where researchers evaluate their video search systems in a competitive setting. Searching in videos is often a two-step process: first some sort of pre-filtering is done, where, for example, users query an indexed archive of files, followed by a human-based browsing, where users skim the returned result set in search for the relevant file or portion of it. The VBS aims at this whole search process, focusing in particular on its interactive aspects. Encouraged by previous years' results, we created a system that purely addresses the latter issue, i.e., interface and interaction design. By eliminating all kind of video indexing and query processing, we were aiming to demonstrate the importance of good interface design for video search and that its relevance is often underestimated by today's systems. This claim is clearly proven by the results our system achieved in the VBS 2015 competition, where our approach was on a par with the top performing ones. In this paper, we will describe our system along with related design decisions, present our results from the VBS event, and discuss them in further detail.