The main goal of the TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVID) is to promote progress in content-based analysis of and retrieval from digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. TRECVID is a laboratory-style evaluation that attempts to model real world situations or significant component tasks involved in such situations.
Up until 2010, TRECVID used test data from a small number of known professional sources - broadcast news organizations, TV program producers, and surveillance systems - that imposed limits on program style, content, production qualities, language, etc. In 2003 - 2006 TRECVID supported experiments in automatic segmentation, indexing, and content-based retrieval of digital video using broadcast news in English, Arabic, and Chinese. TRECVID also completed two years of pilot studies on exploitation of unedited video rushes provided by the BBC. In 2007 - 2009 TRECVID provided participants with cultural, news magazine, documentary, and education programming supplied by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Tasks using this video included segmentation, search, feature extraction, and copy detection. Systems were tested in rushes video summarization using the BBC rushes. Surveillance event detection was evaluated using airport surveillance video provided by the UK Home Office. Many resources created by NIST and the TRECVID community are available for continued research on this data independent of TRECVID. See the Past data section of the TRECVID website for pointers.
In 2010 TRECVID confronted known-item search and semantic indexing systems with a new set of Internet videos (referred to in what follows as IACC) characterized by a high degree of diversity in creator, content, style, production qualities, original collection device/encoding, language, etc - as is common in much "Web video". The collection also has associated keywords and descriptions provided by the video donor. The videos are available under Creative Commons licenses from the Internet Archive. The only selection criteria imposed by TRECVID beyond the Creative Commons licensing is one of video duration - they are short (less than 6 min). In addition to the IACC data set, NIST began developing an Internet multimedia test collection (HAVIC) with the Linguistic Data Consortium and used it in growing amounts (up to 8000 h) in TRECVID 2010-present. The airport surveillance video, introduced in TRECVID 2009, has been reused each year since.
New in 2013 was video provided by the BBC. Programming from their long-running EastEnders series was used in the instance search task. An additional 600 h of Internet Archive video available under Creative Commons licensing for research (IACC.2) was used for the semantic indexing task as planned from 2013 to 2015 with new test data each year. In addition, a new concept localization (LOC) task was introduced in 2013 up to 2016.
In 2015 a new Video Hyperlinking task (LNK) previously run in MediaEval was added. New in 2016 was the return of the Ad-hoc Video Search (AVS) task using a new IACC.3 dataset (600 hr) and introducing a new pilot "Video to Text" description task.
In TRECVID 2017 NIST will continue 5 of the 2016 tasks with some revisions (AVS, INS, MED, SED, LNK), drop one (LOC), and continue the new pilot task Video to Text Description (VTT).