In this article we present DANCERS, a system for automated indexing and ret
rieval of TV broadcast news. The system output, a topic-based report organi
zation structure, is obtained in three major steps. In the first step, the
visual and the speech streams of a news program are analyzed in order to pa
rtition the program into report segments. In the second step, the transcrib
ed speech of each of the report segments is matched with the content of a l
arge prespecified textual topic database. This database covers a large numb
er of topics and can be updated anytime, e.g., according to the user's inte
rests. The result of the matching procedure is a list of most probable topi
cs per report segment that are used in the last step to merge related neigh
boring segments into reports. The most probable topics that serve as the ba
se for the segment-merging procedure are at the same time the indexes of th
e newly created reports, using which the reports can be retrieved or classi
fied A relative simplicity of the indexing approach, minimized user involve
ment and highly satisfying indexing performance are the major characteristi
cs of our system. (C) 2001 SPIE and IS&T.