DRONEWS

Reaching inaccessible locations for news coverage, especially in cases of natural disasters and accidents, in a timely and cost-efficient manner is crucial for good reporting for news agencies. Currently, one of the most common ways to collect video evidence for such events is through the usage of helicopters. However, this comes at a great cost, which is many times unbearable, especially for smaller news agencies. DRONEWS aims to address this market gap by developing an end-to-end crowdsourcing platform enabling News Agencies to source in a cost-effective manner, near-real-time, user generated drone video streams to enrich news coverage and journalistic content towards increasing their monetization potential. The aim of the DRONEWS project is to provide news agencies and digital media companies with the ability to source near real-time user generated drone videos of remote locations and/or urgent events such as accidents, disasters etc. The key innovation of DRONEWS is that it enables the crowdsourcing of drone-captured videos in real-time, the verification of the uploaded videos, video intelligence for key frame extraction and annotation of captured scenes, and the automatic removal of sensitive information from these videos.

Pragma-IOT will deal with video key frame extraction annotation and privacy enhancing tools and the toolkit for video annotation (based on key frame extraction methods from video) and will deliver privacy enhancing tools for the video management.