Witness

Video archives—whether in media production, surveillance, education, or legal discovery—contain vast amounts of unsearchable content. Practitioners spend hours scrubbing timelines to find specific moments, relying on manual metadata or transcripts that fail to capture semantic queries. Users remember what happens but not when, and existing keyword-based tools cannot answer conceptual queries like "the moment the rocket booster separates" or "two people arguing."

A decentralized network of competing miners can solve this by applying state-of-the-art vision and audio models to index video content in real time. Rather than relying on a single company's search algorithm, miners compete on accuracy—those who return precise, relevant timestamps earn incentives; those who do not are deprioritized. Validators generate synthetic ground-truth tasks from publicly available datasets to measure accuracy without bias, and publish results transparently on-chain.

ChronoSeek implements this model on Bittensor. Miners download videos, extract visual features using CLIP, optionally transcribe and score speech segments, and return ranked timestamp intervals. Validators load ActivityNet Captions tasks, broadcast signed queries to top-ranked miners, score responses using Intersection-over-Union against ground truths, and update on-chain weights. Validators can optionally expose a public gateway API, allowing enterprises and developers to query the entire subnet without managing individual miner connections.

ChronoSeek is a decentralized Bittensor subnet for semantic video moment retrieval, enabling natural-language search to find precise timestamp intervals within videos. Miners perform visual retrieval using CLIP and transcript-based speech understanding, while validators generate synthetic ActivityNet-based tasks to score miners and optionally expose a public gateway API for organic requests.