MeVer has contributed to the editing and authoring of the brand new book “Video Verification in the Fake News Era” published by Springer last week.

The book covers a range of recent technological advances and practical tools for discovering, verifying and visualizing social media video content, and managing related rights. In today’s increasingly disinformation-fraught media landscape, access to sophisticated editing and content management tools and the ease with which fake information spreads in electronic networks, require the entire news and media industries to carefully verify third-party content before publishing it.

Our team authored or contributed to four chapters, each focusing on a technical approach that can be employed for tackling different parts of the verification process:

-Finding Near-Duplicate Videos in Large-scale Collections describes ways of identifying near-duplicate or highly similar videos compared to a video of interest (query) in very large video collections. This is of importance when one wants to quickly check whether a suspicious video already appeared in the past and was debunked. -Finding Semantically Related Videos in Closed Collections presents state-of-the-art approaches for two video retrieval tasks: a) accurately classifying videos into concepts, and b) identifying and recognizing logos shown in videos. -Detecting Manipulations in Video offers a glimpse into the increasingly challenging problem of digital video manipulation and explores the potential of automatic detection methods based on deep learning. -Verification of Web Videos through Analysis of their Online Context presents an online tool that aims at assisting investigators with the verification of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook videos by producing a number of contextual bits of information and credibility cues.

We consider the book to be of interest to computer scientists and researchers, news and media professionals, as well as policymakers and data-savvy media consumers.