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Project Objectives

The goals and intended outcomes of the ReCAP project — a Horizon 2020 co-funded initiative for real-time content analysis and processing.

The ReCAP project set out to transform how media organisations handle the growing flood of digital content. By developing automatic content analysis services, the initiative aimed to replace slow, manual metadata creation with real-time, machine-driven processing. This would allow broadcasters, production companies, and asset managers to keep pace with rapidly expanding libraries of video, audio, and images from multiple sources. The platform was designed to be both affordable and scalable, making advanced analysis accessible to enterprises of all sizes rather than only large players with proprietary systems.

At the heart of ReCAP's vision was the need to support modern, agile media workflows. As content consumption shifted across devices and platforms, production and playout targets became more heterogeneous than ever. The project sought to create a flexible system capable of ingesting material from diverse sources and delivering enriched metadata to any output destination. This responsiveness was essential for maintaining quality assurance in an environment where mobile access, on-demand viewing, and multi-platform distribution had become the norm.

A key challenge ReCAP addressed was the integrity and richness of metadata across the content lifecycle. In traditional asset management, metadata often suffered from inconsistency or required costly manual oversight. By integrating visual and content analysis tools into automated pipelines, the project aimed to generate reliable, high-quality data that could enrich archives and streamline search, retrieval, and reuse. This approach promised to unlock the value of historical archives while supporting the rapid turnaround expected in modern content production.

The consortium behind ReCAP brought together expertise from across the media and technology landscape, reflecting the collaborative spirit of Horizon 2020 funding. By pooling knowledge in real-time processing, machine analysis, and broadcast workflows, the partners worked toward a shared platform that could adapt to industry needs. Though the project concluded in 2018, its exploration of automated, cost-effective content analysis continues to inform how the sector approaches the challenges of an ever-expanding, multi-device media environment.

What ReCAP Set Out to Achieve

The ReCAP project aimed to bring automatic content analysis services to market as an affordable, scalable platform. Co-funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme under grant agreement No 732461, the initiative ran until May 2018 and focused on enhancing metadata-driven media workflows across broadcast and post-production environments.

Real-Time Metadata Extraction

Automatically analyse and extract time-stamped, descriptive and technical metadata from live broadcast-quality video as well as archive content, enabling smarter search, retrieval, and asset management.

Intelligent Content Analysis

Develop capabilities for logo detection, face detection, and content duplication detection — helping broadcasters and post-production teams identify and catalogue visual elements at scale.

Automated Quality Control

Detect quality issues in real time, including lost or frozen video frames, dropouts, visible macroblocking, and provide estimation of sharpness and noise levels — reducing reliance on manual QC processes.

Unlocking Archive Value

Apply content analysis to historical media archives, surfacing previously hidden or uncatalogued material and making it accessible within modern Media Asset Management systems.

Affordable & Scalable Platform

Move beyond enterprise-only, high-end offerings by delivering a platform that could be adopted by a wider range of media organisations, from smaller post-production houses to large broadcasters.

Consortium-Driven Innovation

Combine the expertise of four European partners — NMR (systems integration, London), Tools On Air (broadcast applications, Austria), Nablet (codec and transcoding, Germany), and Joanneum Research (applied research, Austria) — to bridge the gap between research and commercial deployment.

This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732461.