Automation of systems enabling search on stored video data
Alan Hanjalić, Marco Ceccarelli, Reginald L. Lagendijk, Jan Biemond · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1997
In the European project SMASH mass-market storage systems for domestic use are under study. Besides the storage technology that is developed in this project, the related objective of user-friendly browsing/query of video data is studied as well. Key issues in developing a user-friendly system are (1) minimizing the user-intervention in preparatory steps (extraction and storage of representative information needed for browsing/query), (2) providing an acceptable representation of the stored video content in view of a higher automation level, (3) the possibility for performing these steps directly on the incoming stream at storage time, and (4) parameter-robustness of algorithms used for these steps. This paper proposes and validate novel approaches for automation of mentioned preparatory phases. A detection method for abrupt shot changes is proposed, using locally computed threshold based on a statistical model for frame-to-frame differences. For the extraction of representative frames (key frames) an approach is presented which distributes a given number of key frames over the sequence depending on content changes in a temporal segment of the sequence. A multimedia database is introduced, able to automatically store all bibliographic information about a recorded video as well as a visual representation of the content without any manual intervention from the user.