Evaluating multiple video understanding and retrieval tasks at trecvid 2021

George Awad

Abstract: The TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVID) is a TREC-style video analysis and retrieval evaluation with the goal of promoting progress in research and development of content-based exploitation and retrieval of information from digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. Over the last twenty years this effort has yielded a better understanding of how systems can effectively accomplish such processing and how one can reliably benchmark their performance. TRECVID has been funded by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and other US government agencies. In addition, many organizations and individuals worldwide contribute significant time and effort. TRECVID 2021 represented a continuation of six tasks. In total, 39 teams from various research organizations worldwide signed up to join the evaluation campaign this year, where 22 teams (Table 1) completed one or more of the following six tasks, and 17 teams registered but did not submit any runs (Table 2): 1. Ad-hoc Video Search (AVS) 2. Instance Search (INS) 3. Disaster Scene Description and Indexing (DSDI) 4. Video to Text Description (VTT) 5. Activities in Extended Video (ActEV) 6. Video Summarization (VSUM).