In Video Veritas – Or Not? Viennese Researchers Declare War on Fake News Videos

MODUL University Vienna Develops Solution for the Automatic Identification of Fake Video Content

(firmenpresse) - Thanks to the work of an international research group involving MODUL Technology GmbH, it will now be possible to eliminate fake videos from news reports and protect the reputations of responsible media providers. The aim of their development, which is being carried out as part of a well funded EU project, is to identify new news-relevant videos on social networks, verify the presented content and professionally clear the usage rights with the content creators. The overall functionality is combined and automated with the help of a technology developed by the Viennese company webLyzard technology. This will avoid the inadvertent use of fake or manipulated videos by serious media outlets and alleviates the considerable effort involved in ensuring the authenticity of news reports.

Dramatic news is only truly credible if it is accompanied by original footage. Such valuable material is more widely available than ever before today – an observer armed with a smart phone is almost always at the scene of events and able to make video content available within a matter of seconds. Such user-generated videos (UGV) are extremely valuable for news services, as they often provide the very first images of an event. However, they can also irrevocably destroy the reputation of a service if they later prove to be manipulated or falsified. It is therefore extremely important that - often under considerable time pressure - the truth of such videos can be verified, and it is a process that consumes huge resources within media organizations. A group of international media technology experts will now drastically reduce the effort involved here: as part of the EU project "InVID – In Video Veritas", which has been allocated several million euros in funding, they will create a web-based platform which automatically identifies UGVs on the basis of their relevance, and confirms or rejects their credibility using the very latest analysis processes.

Certificate of Authenticity

The leader of the project''s media selection and analysis work, Dr. Lyndon Nixon from the Department of New Media Technology at the MODUL University Vienna, explains the commercial benefits of the project: "InVID will more or less provide a certificate of authenticity for UGVs. This means that broadcasters, news agencies, magazines, editors and web providers can rely on the authenticity of the available material. This will enable them to make huge savings on resources and improve the quality of their news significantly."

However, a great deal of technical innovations are needed before the service can be made available online: the existing process for determining the authenticity of content relies on individual human assessment rather than objectively quantifiable criteria. Those responsible for such content verification must very quickly establish whether the time and location of the event portrayed in the video appear plausible (do the landscape, time of day, clothing etc. match the event?), that the video material was not manipulated and that the metadata is correct. They also have to find out who recorded the video, whether this person can be contacted for the purpose of verification and the agreement of usage rights, whether similar images of the same event are available on the web, and the extent to which the event is already being discussed on social media.

InVID will complete all of the main steps in this process automatically. To begin, topics that are most widely discussed at present will be identified. Videos that are available on these topics on social networks will then be found, indexed, temporally fragmented and annotated based on their content. Based on the annotations and metadata, which include information about the user, location and time of recording, it will be possible to carry out an initial ranking of the videos. The subsequent verification process is focused on videos that are very likely to be relevant and reliable. The automatic verification process will then verify whether the video has already featured on the web in a different context and whether it has been technically manipulated in some way. When all the checks have been completed and the outcome is positive, other components of the InVID platform will support the clarification of all legal issues concerning the use of this video. These include the identification of the video producer and the negotiation and contractual regulation of the associated rights and suitable remuneration for them. Innovative data analyses and visualizations developed by the webLyzard Web Intelligence Platform will be used for all of these processes. This platform was specifically developed for the evaluation of large volumes of data on social media by the Viennese company webLyzard technology GmbH – a specialist in media analysis and market research.

Austrian News Videos Will Also be Verified in Future
The team working with Dr. Nixon can draw on the comprehensive journalism skills of experts in the news industry for the development of all of these technical innovations. Dr. Nixon explains: "Supporting the journalists in press agencies and television news studios directly with the technology will constitute a core competency of InVID. For this reason, it is particularly valuable for us to have three of the leading news organizations on board with us in InVID: the Austria Presse Agentur (APA), Deutsche Welle and Agence France Presse (AFP). The participation of the APA ensures that, in addition to international reports, particular attention will also be paid to regional reports from Austria."

As Dr. Nixon adds, for the InVID-Team at the MODUL University Vienna, the verification process does not start with the video but with the selection of the sources: "It is important to use only videos from reliable sources. We have already been able to develop a very helpful tool at the MODUL University Vienna which has become known as the ''Internet''s lie detector''. We will develop this tool further so that it can identify social media user reputation with a high degree of accuracy."

The international consortium with project participants from Austria, France, Germany, Spain and Greece will combine numerous independently developed technologies for the first time, develop them further and use them for the purpose of verifying UGVs. Through the participation of leading European organizations with many years of experience in the fields of innovation and media technology, the InVID project is ideally equipped to meet the extraordinary technical challenges set by this project.

For further information, visit:
•www.modul.ac.at/nmt
•www.modultech.eu
•www.weblyzard.com

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Datum: 15.12.2015 - 04:35 Uhr
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Typ of Press Release: Erfolgsprojekt
type of sending: Veröffentlichung
Date of sending: 15.12.2015
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