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Open In Colab When watching a talk or presentation, it’s common to take notes or share interesting points with others. Often, the content on the slides captures our attention. At VideoDB, we follow many top engineering processes and regularly take notes from talks and conferences, which we share internally on our Slack channel. However, when trying to recall specific parts of these talks, only a few keywords might come to mind. To address this, we built an internal tool that stores all these talks in VideoDB, allowing us to find and share the content on the screen in text form using a search query. Let’s explore the problem: What was on the screen when the speaker discussed the “hard and fast rule” in the following video?
This notebook is a step towards creating a Slack bot that posts valuable engineering practices from top tech talks daily. Stay Tuned!

Introduction

In this tutorial, we’ll explore an advanced yet accessible technique for retrieving visual information from video content based on what the speaker was discussing. Specifically, we’ll focus on finding information on slides in a video recording of a speech. As video content continues to grow in volume and importance, being able to quickly find specific information within videos becomes crucial. Imagine being able to locate a particular statistic mentioned in an hour-long presentation without watching the entire video. That’s the power of multimodal video search! This approach combines VideoDB’s powerful scene indexing capabilities with spoken word search to create a robust, multimodal search pipeline. Don’t worry if these terms sound complex - we’ll break everything down step by step!

Setup

Installing packages

API Keys

Before proceeding, ensure access to VideoDB. If not, sign up for API access on the respective platforms. Get your API key from VideoDB Console (Free for first 50 uploads, No credit card required).

Step 1: Connect to VideoDB

Gear up by establishing a connection to VideoDB.

Step 2: Upload the Video

Next, let’s upload our sample video:

Step 3: Index the Video on Different Modalities

Now comes the exciting part - we’re going to index our video in two ways:
  1. Indexing spoken content (what’s being said in the video)
  2. Indexing visual content (what’s being shown in the video)

Indexing Spoken Content

This function transcribes the speech in the video and indexes it, making it searchable.

Find Right Configuration for Scene Indexing

To learn more about Scene Index, explore the following guides:
  • Quickstart Guide guide provides a step-by-step introduction to Scene Index. It’s ideal for getting started quickly and understanding the primary functions.
  • Scene Extraction Options Guide delves deeper into the various options available for scene extraction within Scene Index. It covers advanced settings, customization features, and tips for optimizing scene extraction based on different needs and preferences.
  1. Finding the Best Configuration for Scene Extraction
For conference videos, we would like to lower threshold to capture all slides. Let’s run the scene extraction again and see the results.
2. Finding the Right prompt for Indexing Testing the prompt on some sample scenes first is a sensible approach. It allows you to experiment and make adjustments without committing to the entire video, which can help manage costs. The prompt guides the visual model to identify and describe the content of slides in each scene, outputting “None” if no slides are visible. This targeted testing can help fine-tune the model’s performance before applying it to the entire video.
Now that we have found the right configuration for Scene Indexing, it’s like we’ve found the perfect match—let’s commit to indexing those scenes!

Index Scenes With The Finalized Config and Prompt

This function fits all the steps above into a single cell and processes the entire video accordingly:
  1. It breaks the video into scenes using a shot-based approach
  2. For each scene, it analyzes the visual content based on the given prompt
  3. It creates an index of these scene descriptions

Step 4: Search Pipeline Implementation

The heart of this approach is the search pipeline, which combines spoken word search with scene indexing. This pipeline does the following:
  1. Performs a keyword search on the spoken word index
  2. Extracts time ranges from the search results
  3. Retrieves the scenes
  4. Filters scenes based on overlaps with the time ranges from the spoken word search
  5. Returns the descriptions of these scenes (our slide content) and their time ranges

Step 5: Viewing the Search Results

Finally, let’s use our search pipeline:
It returns scenes where the spoken words match your query, along with the content of any slides visible in those scenes. Here’s the result for this particular search query “hard and fast rule”:

The content written on the slide is

Here are some other query outputs using the same search pipeline:

Search for “stripe api review”

API REVIEW CHECKLIST

Search for “Friction Log”

Internal Terminal Dogfooding Instructions

Conclusion

This document has outlined a sophisticated approach to multimodal video search, combining spoken word indexing with scene-based visual analysis. By leveraging VideoDB’s powerful indexing and search capabilities, we’ve created a pipeline that can find specific visual content (in this case, slide information) based on spoken queries. This technique has broad applications beyond just searching for slides in speeches. It could be adapted for various use cases where visual information needs to be retrieved based on audio content, such as:
  • Finding product demonstrations in long-form video content
  • Identifying key moments in educational videos
  • Searching for specific visual elements in recorded meetings or presentations
As video content continues to grow in importance and volume, tools and techniques like these will become increasingly valuable for efficient information retrieval and analysis.

Further Resources

To learn more about Scene Index, explore the following guides:

Scene Index Quickstart

Step-by-step introduction to Scene Index for quick setup and primary functions.

Scene Extraction Options

Deep dive into various options for scene extraction, advanced settings, and optimization.

Advanced Visual Search

Advanced techniques for visual content retrieval and complex search scenarios.

Custom Annotation Pipelines

Build custom annotation pipelines for specialized video analysis workflows.

Get Support

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to us:

Discord Community

Connect with the VideoDB community for support and discussions

GitHub

Explore our open source projects and contribute

VideoDB

Visit our main website for more information