Video Browser Showdown - The Video Retrieval Competition

The VBS is an international video content search competition that evaluates the state-of-the-art of interactive video retrieval systems. It is performed annually as a special event at the International Conference on MultiMedia Modeling (MMM) since 2012. It aims at pushing research on large-scale video retrieval systems that are effective, fast, and easy to use for content search scenarios that are truly relevant in practice (e.g., known-item search in an ever-increasing video archive, as nowadays ubiquitous in many domains of our digital world).

The VBS usually consists of an expert session and a novice session. In the expert session the developers of the systems themselves try to solve different types of content search queries that are issued in an ad-hoc manner. Although the dataset itself is available to the researchers several months before the actual competition, the queries are unknown in advance and issued on-site. In the novice session volunteers from the MMM conference audience (without help from the experts) are required to solve another set of tasks. This should ensure that the interactive video retrieval tools do not only improve in terms of retrieval performance but also in terms of usage (i.e., ease-of-use).