Effects of Human Cognition-Inspired Task Presentation on Interactive Video Retrieval

Interactive video retrieval is a cooperative process between humans and retrieval systems. Large-scale evaluation campaigns, however, often overlook human factors, such as the effects of perception, attention, and memory, when assessing media retrieval systems. Consequently, their setups fall short of emulating realistic retrieval scenarios. In this article, we study the effect of task target presentation on the rate of retrieval success in a large crowdsourced experiment. To do this, we design novel task presentation modes based on concepts in media memorability, implement the pipelines necessary for processing target video segments, and build a custom experimental platform for the final evaluation. Our findings demonstrate that the way in which the target of a video retrieval task is presented has a substantial influence on the difficulty of the retrieval task and that individuals can successfully retrieve a target video segment despite reducing or even altering the provided hints, opening up a discussion around future evaluation protocols in the domain of interactive media retrieval.