Vision: a digital video library

The goal of the VISION (Video Indexing for SearchIng Over Networks)project is to establish a comprehensive, online digital videolibrary. We are developing automatic mechanisms to populate thelibrary and provide content-based search and retrieval overcomputer networks. The salient feature of our approach is theintegrated application of mature image or video processing,information retrieval, speech feature extraction and word-spottingtechnologies for efficient creation and exploration of the librarymaterials. First, full-motion video is captured in real-time withflexible qualities to meet the requirements of library patronsconnected via a wide range of network bandwidths. Then, the videosare automatically segmented into a number of logically meaningfulvideo clips by our novel two-step algorithm based on video andaudio contents. A closed caption decoder and/or word-spotter isbeing incorporated into the system to extract textual informationto index the video clips by their contents. Finally, allinformation is stored in a full-text information retrieval systemfor content-baaed exploration of the library over networks ofvarying bandwidths.