Project Information
The MuNCH (Multimedia aNalysis for Cultural Heritage) project is part of NWOs CATCH (Continous Access To Cultural Heritage) program.
MuNCH focuses on knowledge enrichment by means of automated analyses of digital images and video. With the advent of digital communication, we live in the exciting times of broad and narrow casting through the Internet, of passive and active viewers, of direct or delayed broadcast, and of digital pictures being delivered in the museum or at home. At the same time, the picture and television archives turn digital. In these demanding times, the archives are likely to be swamped with information requests unless they swiftly adapt to partially automatic annotation and digital retrieval. The aim of this project is to provide faster and more complete access to pictures in cultural archives through digital analysis.
MuNCH is a project of the Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam of the University of Amsterdam, the Business Informatics group of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Sound and Vision (Beeld en Geluid) research ways to automatically analyse multimedia archives to facilitate searching or browsing. The technology used is founded on the Mediamill semantic video search engine.
The project started in January 2006 and will run until March 2010.
People
Laura Hollink - VU, postdoc - daily project management
Bouke Huurnink - UvA, PhD student
Michiel van Liempt - UvA, programmer
Johan Oomen - Beeld en Geluid, Beleidsadviseur, afdeling Informatiebeleid Beeld en Geluid
Maarten de Rijke - UvA, professor
Guus Schreiber - VU, professor
Arnold Smeulders - UvA, professor, project leader