Towards semi-automatic annotations for video and audio corpora

AVATecH (Advancing Video/Audio Technology in Humanities Research) is a project in which two Fraunhofer Institutes and two Max Planck Institutes collaborate in order to promote the development and application of technology for semi-automatic annotation of digital audio and video recordings. One of the aims of the AVATecH project is to implement algorithms that allow for the automatic or semi-automatic creation of pre-annotations for the video corpora, hence reducing the time needed to perform the manual annotation task. Due to the huge size of the corpora, and the extreme variety of the video content, the algorithms developed need to be fast, efficient and robust. In this paper we will present some of the algorithms currently under development, the modifications applied in order to get them working with large video corpora and how the results of the annotations are stored, as well as how they can be integrated in ELAN annotation software.