CATEGORISING video on the internet can be frustrating, especially if you happen to be a search engine. The pictures are incomprehensible and the supposedly descriptive text added by humans is confusing. It’s a notoriously difficult problem, but one that might be cracked by a new system that learns how to add keyword tags to videos by watching YouTube.
Before video-recognition software is put to work it usually has to be “trained” using a library of sample clips. In the past this has involved annotating the library clips by hand – a laborious process that constrains the range of material that…
