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One of the major objectives of COST292 activity is to benchmark state-of-the-art algorithms for multimodal analysis of digital media targeting semantic retrieval. Thus, being a leading international action in content-based retrieval from digital videos, NIST TRECVID evaluation initiative is a focal point of COST292.

Having a long term experience in TRECVID activities, COST292 partners have decided to submit results for evaluation in all four system task of TRECVID 2006, namely shot boundary determination, high-level feature extraction, interactive search and rushes exploitation. This action is coordinated by Dr Janko Calic from University of Bristol, United Kingdom.

Shot boundary detection task is to identify the shot boundaries with their location and type (cut or gradual) in the given video clip. The submission is led by Jenny Benois-Pineau from LABRI Bordeaux, France, joined by contribution from Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.

High-level features system task is evaluating the effectiveness of detection methods for high-level semantic concepts such as "Indoor/Outdoor", "People", "Speech". The group leader is Dr Selim Aksoy from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. Additional contributors are Dublin City University, Ireland and National Technical University from Athens, Greece.

The central system task of interactive search is led by Qianni Zhang from Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom. A retrieval platform is maintained by ITI, Thessaloniki, Greece, while additional contributors include Slovakia with audio classification and Belgrade with relevance feedback.

Finally, the rushes task is coordinated by Janko Calic from University of Bristol, United Kingdom, with contributions from Dublin City University, Ireland, from LABRI, Bordeaux, France and from Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.

After the initial meeting of the COST292 technical committee in San Sebastian, Spain on 1-2 March 2006, it is decided which partners will coordinate and contribute to which system task as well as that the first submission workshop of the TRECVID activity will be hosted by LABRI in Bordeaux, France on 8-9 June 2006. Follow-up activity is planned for early September to conduct the search experiments and compile the search task results.

The core milestones of the TRECVID 2006 submission are as follows:

• 15 August 2006 – Shot Boundary Task due
• 21 August 2006 – Feature task due
• 15 September 2006 – Search task due
• 23 October 2006 – Conference papers due
• 7 November 2006 – Workshop registration closes
• 13-14 November 2006 – NIST conference