Practical elimination of near-duplicates from web video search

Current web video search results rely exclusively on text keywords or user-supplied tags. A search on typical popular video often returns many duplicate and near-duplicate videos in the top results. This paper outlines ways to cluster and filter out the near-duplicate video using a hierarchical approach. Initial triage is performed using fast signatures derived from color histograms. Only when a video cannot be clearly classified as novel or near-duplicate using global signatures, we apply a more expensive local feature based near-duplicate detection which provides very accurate duplicate analysis through more costly computation. The results of 24 queries in a data set of 12,790 videos retrieved from Google, Yahoo! and YouTube show that this hierarchical approach can dramatically reduce redundant video displayed to the user in the top result set, at relatively small computational cost.