Searching for a Specific Person in Broadcast News Video

People as news subjects play an important role in broadcast news and finding a specific person is a major challenge for multimedia retrieval. Beyond mere content-based general retrieval, this task requires exploitation of the structure, time sequence and meaning of news content. We introduce a comprehensive approach to discovering clues for finding a specific person in broadcast news video. Various information aspects are investigated, including text information, timing information, scene detection, and face recognition. Experimental results on the TREC 2003 video search task show that our approach can achieve surprisingly high performance by exploiting broadly diverse information to find specific named people.