The Digital Video Library System:Vision and Design

The digital libraries of the future will provide electronic access to information in many different forms. Recent technological advances make the storage and transmission of digital video information possible. This paper will describe the design of a Digital Video Library System (DVLS) suitable for storing, indexing, searching, and retrieving video and audio information and providing that information across the Internet or the evolving National Information Infrastructure. To be an effective library, users need to be able to find the video segments they want. Realizing this goal will require ground-breaking research into automatic content-based indexing of videos that will significantly improve the users' ability to access specific segments of interest with videos. In our approach, videos, soundtracks and transcripts will be digitized, and information from the soundtrack and transcripts will be used to automatically index videos in a frame by frame manner. This will allow users to quickly search indices for multiple videos to locate segments of interest, and to view and manipulate these segments on their remote computer. While this technology would be applicable to any collection of videos, we will target educational users, providing teachers with the ability to select segments of nature and/or current events videos which complement their lessons.