33rd International Conference on Multimedia Modeling

January 05–08, 2027 Siem Reap, Cambodia

Call for VBS Papers / Systems

As in previous years, MMM 2027 will organize the Video Browser Showdown (VBS 2027) as a special side event to the Welcome Reception. It will be a moderated session where participants solve Known-Item Search (KIS – visual, textual, chat/panel), Ad-Hoc Video Search (AVS), and Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks that are issued as live presentation of scenes of interest, either as a visual clip or as a textual description (an overview of task types can be found here). Results need to be submitted to the VBS server (DRES), which evaluates the correctness of submissions and ranks all teams.

Important Notes to Annual Participants

Like in previous years, VBS 2027 will have the following restrictions:

Datasets

VBS 2027 will use the entire V3C dataset (from the Vimeo Creative Commons Collection) in collaboration with NIST, i.e., TRECVID 2026 (with the Ad-Hoc Video Search (AVS) Task), as well as the extended marine video (underwater/scuba diving) dataset and the LapGynLHE (aka GynSurg) dataset (surgeries in laparoscopic gynecology), but most tasks will be issued from V3C.

V3C

V3C includes three shards:

To download the dataset (provided by NIST), please complete this data agreement form and send a scan to angela.ellis@nist.gov with CC to gawad@nist.gov and ks@itec.aau.at. In the response email by NIST, you will find the link for downloading the data. V3C is described in this paper.

Marine Video Kit (MVK)

The marine video (underwater) dataset has been provided by Prof. Sai-Kit Yeung (many thanks!) and is available for download here. MVK is described in this paper.

GynSurg

The GynSurg dataset (laparoscopic gynecology – also known as LHE75 or GynSurgLHE) is available for download via SFTP. Please contact Klaus Schoeffmann for the data agreement form and (after signing the form) the username and password. GynSurg is described in this paper.

VBS Server and Testing

The VBS uses the Distributed Retrieval Evaluation Server (DRES) to evaluate found segments for correctness. DRES will run as a public service on a server at Klagenfurt University, Austria.

Participants can submit found segments to the server via a simple HTTP-like protocol described in the Client Examples. The format is defined in the OpenAPI specification.

The server is connected to a projector on-site and presents the current score of all teams live (in addition to presenting task descriptions). The server and example tasks from previous years are provided here; for Angular systems, another description is provided here.

Participation

Anyone with an exploratory video search tool that allows for retrieval, interactive browsing, and exploration in a video collection may participate. The only requirement is to submit an extended demo paper about the system by the submission deadline.

There are no restrictions regarding allowed features, except for presentation screen recording during the competition, which is not allowed. That means in addition to interactive content search you can use any automatic content search as well.

Participants are expected to implement the functionality to send results and logs to the VBS Server via a REST API, which requires some effort for integration.

Paper Submission Instructions

To participate, please submit an extended demo paper (6+2 pages in Springer LNCS format, where the 2 pages may be used for references) by the deadline via ConfTool, selecting the "Video Browser Showdown" track.

The submission should include a detailed description of the video search tool (including a screenshot) and how it supports interactive search in video data. Submissions will be peer-reviewed to ensure maximum quality. Accepted papers will be published in the proceedings of the MMM conference.

In the public VBS session, each system needs to be presented (typically as a concise introductory video, or sometimes as a poster – but this will depend on the local situation and will be announced a few weeks before the competition).

Important Dates

All deadlines refer to 23:59 in the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.

See also the full Important Dates page.

Existing Tools and Results

In order to give new teams an easy entry, we also provide existing tools and results that are described here.

Journal Paper

We plan to write a joint journal paper after the VBS competition, to which each participating team should contribute. The winning team will be honored to be in charge of the journal paper (as the main author).

For enquiries, please contact: vbs@mmm2027.net