Keyword spotting for video soundtrack indexing

The amount of available video information is dramatically increasing due to the development of multimedia applications. As a consequence, content based retrieval tools are urgently needed for fast and easy access to multimedia database but also to movies and recorded video news. In particular, queries may rely on off-line indexing. Keyword spotting on video soundtracks could be of great help in this indexation process and in the future associated with pattern or event recognition out of the strictly visual information. Specific constraints for this application are identified and a solution based on phonemic lattices is proposed. The word spotter achieves indexing on open vocabularies uttered by any speaker. It is fast enough for practical applications and does not require much additional stored information.