Semiautomatic video database system

We present a prototype video database system designed to accept video sequences as well as still images. The system indexes these sequences based on scene changes, creates a primitive structure of these sequences, and searches this structure for queried objects using specific color features. A video sequence input to the database is first indexed into subsequences using a color histogram difference method. A hierarchical structure is created by thresholding the sequences at various levels of inter-frame difference. For every subsequence that is identified, the first frame in that subsequence, the representative frame, is entered into the database. The system then automatically generates a description for the frame in terms of its color histogram features. Subsequently, the video sequence may be searched for objects (specified as regions of other video sequence frames or still images) using color similarity matching.