A Gram-Based String Paradigm for Efficient Video Subsequence Search

The unprecedented increase in the generation and dissemination of video data has created an urgent demand for the large-scale video content management system to quickly retrieve videos of users' interests. Traditionally, video sequence data are managed by high-dimensional indexing structures, most of which suffer from the well-known “curse of dimensionality” and lack of support of subsequence retrieval. Inspired by the high efficiency of string indexing methods, in this paper, we present a string paradigm called VideoGram for large-scale video sequence indexing to achieve fast similarity search. In VideoGram, the feature space is modeled as a set of visual words. Each database video sequence is mapped into a string. A gram-based indexing structure is then built to tackle the effect of the “curse of dimensionality” and support video subsequence matching. Given a high-dimensional query video sequence, retrieval is performed by transforming the query into a string and then searching the matched strings from the index structure. By doing so, expensive high-dimensional similarity computations can be completely avoided. An efficient sequence search algorithm with upper bound pruning power is also presented. We conduct an extensive performance study on real-life video collections to validate the novelties of our proposal.