ABSTRACT

Recently, The Guardian, one of Britain’s most popular daily newspapers, published an online article,* recognizing the fth anniversary of the video sharing portal YouTube.† YouTube is at the forefront of a recent development that, in 2006, convinced the renowned Time magazine to dedicate their Person of the Year award to You. You represents the millions of people that started to voluntarily generate (user-generated) content, for example, in Wikipedia, Facebook, and, of course, YouTube. More and more people do not only actively consume content, but they have also started to create their own content. Thus, we are observing a paradigm change from the rather passive information consumption habit to a more active information search. Tim Berners-Lee, credited for inventing the World Wide Web (WWW), is convinced that eventually this development will completely change the way in which we engage information. During a discussion following his keynote speech “The Web at 20” at the BBC documentary “Digital Revolution,” he envisioned that

This chapter illustrates how users can be assisted in exploring such digital video libraries. First, a brief introduction is provided of basic concepts of video retrieval, a research area that has drawn more and more attention since the rise of YouTube. Arguing that personalization techniques can be employed that assist the users in identifying videos they are interested in, different approaches are then surveyed that are used to gather user information and introduce techniques to exploit this information to recommend video documents that match users’ personal interests.