Abstract

The task of partial copy detection in videos aims at finding if one or more segments of a query video have (transformed) copies in a large dataset. Since collecting and annotating large datasets of real par- tial copies are extremely time-consuming, previous video copy detection research used either small-scale datasets or large datasets with simulated partial copies by imposing several pre-defined transformations (e.g., pho- tometric or geometric changes). While the simulated datasets were useful for research, it is unknown how well the techniques developed on such data work on real copies, which are often too complex to be simulated. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale video copy database (VCDB) with over 100,000 Web videos, containing more than 9,000 copied segment pairs found through careful manual annotation. We further benchmark a baseline system on VCDB, which has demonstrated state-of-the-art results in recent copy detection research. Our evaluation suggests that existing techniques—which have shown near-perfect results on the sim- ulated benchmarks—are far from satisfactory in detecting complex real copies. We believe that the release of VCDB will largely advance the research around this challenging problem.