DIRECT-INFO A Media Monitoring System for Sponsorship Tracking

DIRECT-INFO is a system for media monitoring applied to the field of sponsorship tracking. Significant parts of TV streams and electronic press feeds are automatically selected and subsequently monitored to find appearances of the name or logo of a sponsoring company in connection with the sponsored party. For this purpose basic features are fully automatically extracted from TV and press and thereafter fused to semantically meaningful reports to support executive decision makers. Extracted features include logos, positive & negative mentions of a brand or product, multimodal video segmentation, speech-to-text transcripts, detected topics and genre classification. In this paper we first describe the technical workflow and architecture of the DIRECT-INFO system and then present the main innovations in four key areas.