INESC TEC researcher Luís Vilaça has been recognised by the international scientific community after presenting two papers at two of the most prestigious conferences in the multimedia field, both held in Dublin: the IEEE International Conference on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI) and ACM Multimedia – the latter classified as A*, the highest level of scientific excellence. The papers explore new methods for searching and recommending audiovisual content that use the video itself to create richer semantic descriptions.
Today, when we search for videos on YouTube or streaming platforms, for example, the search process relies on words that the system tries to match in titles, descriptions and metadata written by someone. More recently, search options have also started to include subtitles. Ultimately, searches are still limited to text, which is why the INESC TEC researcher proposes something truly innovative: an advanced search system that uses the multimedia content itself as the main source of information.
“The papers presented stem from the work developed as part of my PhD thesis, dedicated to creating an advanced system for searching and recommending audiovisual content. The idea is to use the dialogue present in videos to build indexing engines capable of generating more expressive descriptions of multimedia content, capturing deeper semantic relationships and overcoming the limitations of current automatic subtitling and text-based search methods,” explained Luís Vilaça.
According to the researcher, the results show that current approaches show very limited expressiveness and a strong dependence on textual interfaces, which undermines search performance when users rely on audio or video passages as their starting point. In other words, even when a video is highly complex, the way it is currently described is very poor and heavily dependent on written text.
In addition to the scientific impact, participating in both conferences was particularly meaningful for the researcher and for the research group he is part of. “Industry participation in these conferences is frequent, which makes them a unique opportunity for sharing and knowledge exchange between academia and companies. In areas with such high demand and such fast evolution and development, it is crucial that we are present: on the one hand, we can disseminate the work we do at INESC TEC and, on the other, understand the real needs of the market,” he highlighted.
Among the emerging trends identified by the researcher are the growing interest in creating and processing 3D content and the development of Artificial Intelligence agents capable of searching, generating and recommending multimedia content in a more natural and efficient way.
The international recognition of Luís Vilaça’s work reflects not only the researcher’s individual merit, but also INESC TEC’s strategy in the fields of multimedia, AI and content processing.
The researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with INESC TEC through FCT
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