News Video Indexing and Abstraction by Specific Visual Cues

This chapter addresses the tasks of providing the semantic structure and generating the abstraction of content in broadcast news. Based on extraction of two specific visual cues, Main Speaker Close-Up (MSC) and news caption, a hierarchy of news video index is automatically constructed for efficient access to multi-level contents. In addition, a unique MSC-based video abstraction is proposed to help satisfy the need for news preview and key-person highlighting. Experiments on news clips from MPEG-7 video content sets yield encouraging results that prove the efficiency of our video indexing and abstraction scheme.

HYDRA

This chapter describes the design for High-performance Data Recording Architecture (HYDRA). Presently, digital continuous media (CM) are well established as an integral part of many applications. In recent years, a considerable amount of research has focused on the efficient retrieval of such media for many concurrent users. The authors argue that scant attention has been paid to large-scale servers that can record such streams in real time. However, more and more devices produce direct digital output streams, either over wired or wireless networks, and various applications are emerging to make use of them. For example, cameras now provide the means in many industrial applications to monitor, visualize, and diagnose events. Hence, the need arises to capture and store these streams with an efficient data stream recorder that can handle both recording and playback of many streams simultaneously and provide a central repository for all data. With this chapter, the authors present the design of the HYDRA system, which uses a unified architecture that integrates multi-stream recording and retrieval in a coherent paradigm, and hence provides support for these emerging applications.

Video Data Management and Information Retrieval

In this chapter, we present a basic introduction to two very important areas of research in the domain of Information Technology, namely, video data management and video information retrieval. Both of these areas need additional research efforts to seek solutions to many unresolved problems for efficient data management and information retrieval. We discuss those issues and relevant works done so far in these two fields.

A Framework for Indexing Personal Videoconference

The rapid technical advance of multimedia communication has enabled more and more people to enjoy videoconferences. Traditionally, the personal videoconference is either not recorded or only recorded as ordinary audio and video files that only allow linear access. Moreover, in addition to video and audio channels, other videoconferencing channels, including text chat, file transfer, and whiteboard, also contain valuable information. Therefore, it is not convenient to search or recall the content of videoconference from the archives. However, there exists little research on the management and automatic indexing of personal videoconferences. The existing methods for video indexing, lecture indexing, and meeting support systems cannot be applied to personal videoconference straightforwardly. This chapter discusses important issues unique to personal videoconference and proposes a comprehensive framework for indexing personal videoconference. The framework consists of three modules: videoconference archive acquisition module, videoconference archive indexing module, and indexed videoconference accessing module. This chapter will elaborate on the design principles and implementation methodologies of each module, as well as the intra- and inter-module data, and control flows. Finally, this chapter presents a subjective evaluation protocol for personal videoconference indexing.

A Soft-Decision Histogram from the HSV Color Space for Video Shot Detection

In this chapter, we describe a histogram with soft decision using the Hue, Saturation, Intensity Value (HSV) color space for effective detection of video shot boundaries. In the histogram, we choose the relative importance of hue and intensity depending on the saturation of each pixel. In traditional histograms, each pixel contributes to only one component of the histogram. However, we suggest a soft-decision approach in which each pixel contributes to two components of the histogram. We have done a detailed study of the various frame-to-frame distance measures using the proposed histogram and an Red, Green, Blue (RGB) histogram for video shot detection. The results show that the new histogram has a better shot-detection performance for each of the distance measures. A Web-based application has been developed for video retrieval, which is freely accessible to interested users.

Video Summarization Based on Human Face Detection and Recognition

In this chapter, we deal with video summarization using human facial information by face detection and recognition. Many methods of face detection and face recognition are introduced as both theoretical and practical aspects. Also, we describe the real implementation of the video summarization system based on face detection and recognition

An Overview of Video Information Retrieval Techniques

Video information retrieval is currently a very important topic of research in the area of multimedia databases. Plenty of research work has been undertaken in the past decade to design efficient video information retrieval techniques from the video or multimedia databases. Although a large number of indexing and retrieval techniques have been developed, there are still no universally accepted feature extraction, indexing, and retrieval techniques available. In this chapter, we present an up-to-date overview of various video information retrieval systems. Since the volume of literature available in the field is enormous, only selected works are mentioned.

Video Presentation Model

Lecture-on-Demand (LOD) multimedia presentation technologies among the network are most often used in many communication services. Examples of those applications include video-on-demand, interactive TV and the communication tools on a distance-learning system, and so on. We describe how to present different multimedia objects on a Web-based presentation system. Using characterization of extended media-streaming technologies, we developed a comprehensive system for advanced multimedia content production: support for recording the presentation, retrieving the content, summarizing the presentation, and customizing the presentation. This approach significantly impacts and supports the multimedia presentation authoring processes in terms of methodology and commercial aspects. Using the browser with the Windows Media Services allows those students to view live video of the teacher giving his or her speech, along with synchronized images of presentation slides, and all the annotations/comments. In our experience, this very approach is sufficient to the use of distance learning environment.

Video Abstraction

This chapter introduces Video Abstraction, which is a short representation of an original video, and widely used in video cataloging, indexing, and retrieving. It provides a general view of video abstraction and presents different methods to produce various video abstracts. Also, it discusses a new approach to obtain a video abstract called video digest that uses the closed-caption information available in most videos. The method is efficient in segmenting long videos and producing various lengths of video abstracts automatically. The authors hope that this chapter not only gives newcomers a general and broad view of video abstraction, but also benefits the experienced researchers and professionals by presenting a comprehensive survey on state- of-the-art video abstraction and video digest methods.

Innovative Shot Boundary Detection for Video Indexing

Recently, multimedia information, especially video data, has been made overwhelmingly accessible with the rapid advances in communication and multimedia computing technologies. Video is popular in many applications, which makes the efficient management and retrieval of the growing amount of video information very important. Toward such a demand, an effective video shot boundary detection method is necessary, which is a fundamental operation required in many multimedia applications. In this chapter, an innovative shot boundary detection method using an unsupervised segmentation algorithm and the technique of object tracking based on the segmentation mask maps is presented. A series of experiments on various types of video types are performed, and the experimental results show that our method can obtain object-level information of the video frames as well as accurate shot boundary detection, which are very useful for video content indexing.