New work will build on BBN's Broadcast Monitoring System, a turnkey COTS product that continuously creates a searchable archive of international television broadcasts in Modern Standard Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, or Western Hemisphere Spanish.
BBN Technologies has been awarded a contract valued at $.9M under the Video Analysis and Content Extraction (VACE) program sponsored by the Disruptive Technology Organization (formerly Advanced Research and Development Activity, or ARDA). Under the contract, BBN will integrate several speech and language technologies in a single interface that allows analysts to extract meaning from video files that contains text. This videotext understanding system will incorporate multilingual videotext detection, tracking and recognition technology, and videotext understanding technology.
Video often contains videotext that is useful for analysts and decision makers. For example, graffiti sprayed on a wall can give analysts an indication of local political sentiment, text on signs may help them identify the location where a video was made, and captions on foreign news video can provide valuable information that is not included in the speech track. The VACE program goal is to develop technologies that enable more effective use of the large body of data available from all of these kinds of video sources, as well as those from meetings, conferences, and surveillance and reconnaissance, regardless of the language of the text.
"News, information, and intelligence come from so many different sources now, and being able to understand and distill them rapidly is critical," said Tad Elmer, president and CEO, BBN Technologies. "The work we're doing on the VACE program will provide advanced tools to find information for critical decision making quickly."
According to company statements, BBN Technologies is an advanced technology solutions firm, focused on solving some of the world's most pressing problems. From national security, information security, speech recognition and language translation, to integrating disparate systems and networks. The company was involved in pioneering the development of the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet.
