Automatic annotation of lecture videos for multimedia driven pedagogical platforms

Today’s eLearning websites are heavily loaded with multimedia contents, which are often unstructured, unedited, unsynchronized, and lack inter-links among different multimedia components. Hyperlinking different media modality may provide a solution for quick navigation and easy retrieval of pedagogical content in media driven eLearning websites. In addition, finding meta-data information to describe and annotate media content in eLearning platforms is challenging, laborious, prone to errors, and time-consuming task. Thus annotations for multimedia especially of lecture videos became an important part of video learning objects. To address this issue, this paper proposes three major contributions namely, automated video annotation, the 3-Dimensional (3D) tag clouds, and the hyper interactive presenter (HIP) eLearning platform. Combining existing state-of-the-art SIFT together with tag cloud, a novel approach for automatic lecture video annotation for the HIP is proposed. New video annotations are implemented automatically providing the needed random access in lecture videos within the platform, and a 3D tag cloud is proposed as a new way of user interaction mechanism. A preliminary study of the usefulness of the system has been carried out, and the initial results suggest that 70% of the students opted for using HIP as their preferred eLearning platform at Gjøvik University College (GUC).