PhD POSITION in PERSON RECOGNTION IN AUDIOVISUAL BROADCASTS (36
months; starting Sept./Oct. 2010) IN GRENOBLE (France)
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Key words: video information retrieval, spoken language processing, cross-modal fusion

The ANR QCOMPERE project is one the three consortiums that will participate to the REPERE
challenge. REPERE is a multimedia challenge for person recognition within audiovisual
broadcasts. Its general goals are to improve the state-of-the-heart in automatic processing of
multimedia documents and to create collaborations between specialists of the different modalities
involved in the challenge. More precisely, the participants to the REPERE challenge are expected
to build a system for identifying the persons in audiovisual broadcasts, relying on different
possible information sources: the image of the person, his/her voice and the name written on the
image or pronounced. In order to participate to the call, each consortium needs to address these
four questions: who is seen (person identification in videos), who is speaking (speaker
identification in audio), whose name is written on screen (name identification in video using
OCR), whose name is pronounced (name spotting or name identification in ASR), and be able to
fuse the answers in a single system.

This PhD position focus on the fusion of information for cross-(multi-)modal person
recognition in videos, as well as name identification in videos using OCR.
The PhD will take place in the Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble (LIG) that was created on
January 1, 2007. This laboratory gathers 500 researchers, lecturers-researchers, students and
post-docs, technical and administrative staff members. Research activities are structured around
24 autonomous research groups. Due to its multimodal dimension, this PhD would take place
between two different teams of the laboratory: MRIM and GETALP. The Multimedia
information indexing and retrieval (MRIM) group is specialized (as it is shown in its name) with
multimedia indexing. The GETALP group is specialized in spoken and written natural language
processing. More details on the groups can be found on http://mrim.imag.fr/en/ and
http://getalp.imag.fr/

Applicants should hold a Master Thesis in Computer Science and show a strong academic
background. They should be fluent in English. Competence in French is optional, though
applicants will be encouraged to acquire this skill during the PhD.

For further information, please contact Laurent Besacier (Laurent.Besacier at imag.fr) and
Georges Quénot (Georges.Quenot at imag.fr)