Analysts who work with collections of multimedia to perform information foraging understand how difficult it is to connect information across diverse sets of mixed media. The wealth of information from blogs, social media, and news sites often can provide actionable intelligence; however, many of the tools used on these sources of content are not capable of multimedia analysis because they only analyze a single media type. As such, analysts are taxed to keep a mental model of the relationships among each of the media types when generating the broader content picture. To address this need, we have developed Canopy, a novel visual analytic tool for analyzing multimedia. Canopy provides insight into the multimedia data relationships by exploiting the linkages found in text, images, and video co-occurring in the same document and across the collection. Canopy connects derived and explicit linkages and relationships through multiple connected visualizations to aid analysts in quickly summarizing, searching, and browsing collected information to explore relationships and align content. In this paper, we will discuss the features and capabilities of the Canopy system and walk through a scenario illustrating how this system might be used in an operational environment.

Date Published: 4 February 2013
PDF: 15 pages
Proc. SPIE 8654, Visualization and Data Analysis 2013, 86540M (4 February 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2004735

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8654:
Visualization and Data Analysis 2013
Pak Chung Wong; David L. Kao; Ming C. Hao; Chaomei Chen, Editor(s)