Vision

The goal of the VISION (Video Indexing for SearchIng Over Networks) project is to establish a comprehensive, online digital video library. We are developing automatic mechanisms to populate the library and provide content-based search and retrieval over computer networks. The salient feature of our approach is the integrated application of mature image or video processing, information retrieval, speech feature extraction and word-spotting technologies for efficient creation and exploration of the library materials. First, full-motion video is captured in real-time with flexible qualities to meet the requirements of library patrons connected via a wide range of network bandwidths. Then, the videos are automatically segmented into a number of logically meaningful video clips by our novel two-step algorithm based on video and audio contents. A closed caption decoder and/or word-spotter is being incorporated into the system to extract textual information to index the video clips by their contents. Finally, all information is stored in a full-text information retrieval system for content-baaed exploration of the library over networks of varying bandwidths.