BBN Technologies Awarded $.9M to Advance State-of-the-Art in Automatic Video Understanding.

System Will Detect and Understand Text in English and Foreign Language Video to Provide Timely and Actionable Intelligence

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, announced today it has been awarded a contract valued at $.9M under the Video Analysis and Content Extraction (VACE) program sponsored by the Disruptive Technology Organization (formerly Advanced Research and Development Activity, or ARDA). Under the contract, BBN will integrate several speech and language technologies in a single interface that allows analysts to extract meaning from video files that contains text. This videotext understanding system will incorporate multilingual videotext detection, tracking and recognition technology, and videotext understanding technology.

Video often contains videotext that is useful for analysts and decision makers. For example, graffiti sprayed on a wall can give analysts an indication of local political sentiment, text on signs may help them identify the location where a video was made, and captions on foreign news video can provide valuable information that is not included in the speech track. The VACE program goal is to develop technologies that enable more effective use of the large body of data available from all of these kinds of video sources, as well as those from meetings, conferences, and surveillance and reconnaissance, regardless of the language of the text.

"News, information, and intelligence come from so many different sources now, and being able to understand and distill them rapidly is critical," said Tad Elmer, president and CEO, BBN Technologies. "The work we're doing on the VACE program will provide advanced tools to find information for critical decision making quickly."

About BBN Technologies

BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, is focused on solving some of the world's most pressing problems. From national security, information security, speech recognition and language translation, to integrating disparate systems and networks, BBN has been at the forefront of technological change for over 50 years. Known for pioneering the development of the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, BBN continues to create advances in Internet and networking technologies through its work on ad hoc networking, the semantic web, quantum communications, and advanced protocols. Building on its substantial list of firsts, BBN operates the first metro quantum cryptography network, the first real-time foreign broadcast monitoring system, and has developed the world's first stereoscopic digital mammography system. For more information on BBN Technologies, visit www.bbn.com.