METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR VOICE ANNOTATION AND RETRIEVAL OF MULTIMEDIA DATA

A method, an apparatus, a computer program product and a system for voice annotating and retrieving digital media content are disclosed. An annotation module (420) post annotates digital media data (410), including audio, image and/or video data, with speech. A word lattice (222) can be created from speech annotation (210) dependent upon acoustic and/or linguistic knowledge. An indexing module (430) then indexes the speech-annotated data (422). The word lattice (222) is reverse indexed (230), and content addressing (240) is applied to produce the indexed data (432, 242). A speech query (474) can be generated as input to a retrieval module (480) for retrieving a segment of the indexed digital media data (432). The speech query (474, 310) is converted into a word lattice (322), and a shortlist (344) is produced from it (322) by confidence filtering (330). The shortlist (344) is input to a lattice search engine (350) to search the indexed content (342) to obtain the search result (352).