CENTRE for DIGITAL VIDEO PROCESSING
 Dublin City University, Ireland
Link to Dublin City University, Ireland
 
LINKS
Following is a list of links & short descriptions to some of other digital video projects / products we are keeping eye on.

 
ANSES - Automatic News Summarisation and Extraction System (Imperial College London)
One of the few news video retrieval systems, using shot boundary detection and lexical chanining to merge shots back into story units. BBC news programmes' closed caption go through linguistic analysis to identify organisation, person name, location and dates, which are presented on the web-based search interface.  Link to ANSES web demo
ADViSOR (European consortium)
EU-funded project with partners including France (Interactive Star, Matra Systems & Information), Germany ( RWTH, SWR, Bremen University, Universitaet Osnabrueck, white balance), and Spain (Technical University of Catalonia).  Link to ADViSOR
AT&TV (AT&T Laboratories Cambridge)
AT&TV system is video retrieval system for broadcast TV, developed as part of DART project. Fully automatic indexing system that stores four TV channels for 7 days (24 hours a day) for users to browse and playback.  Link to AT&TV
AVIR (Philips Research Eindhoven)
Audio-Visual Indexing and Retrieval solution for general users, use of intelligent agent, interest profile, leading to personalised multimedia repository browsable and searchable.  Link to AVIR
CueVideo (IBM Almaden Research Centre)
Use of speech recognition, and other video analysis techniques.  Link to CueVideo
DICEMAN (TELTEC Ireland)
ACTS project - Distributed Internet Content Exchange with MPEG-7 and Agents Negotiations.  Link to DICEMAN
DiVAN (INTRACOM S.A.)
Esprit project - Distributed audio Visual Archives Network.  Link to DiVAN
EUROMEDIA (TECMATH)
Esprit project - comprehensive video project trying to apply all the currently available technologies to provide indexing/retrieval to digitial video archives.  Commercial version MediaArchive is already being used in companies.  Link to EUROMEDIA
FRANK (CSIRO, DIMMIS)
A video retrieval system emphasising networking and also 'alternate representations' of the same video information.  Audio track information is used to automatically produce a transcript - this transcript is later used for user's browsing.  Interesting to see how video player goes along with keyframe list and/or transcript, with master/slave relationship.  Link to FRANK
Informedia (Carnegie Mellon University)
A good thing about large projets is that they have resource to poke and try many different angles with the same baseline system.  Informedia project is by far the largest video project on earth - over 2 TB amount of digitised video information.  Informedia uses audio track information to automatically produce transcripts.  Also notable is its emphasis on presentation methods - it tries various novel visualisation techniques for the user-interface.  Another good thing is that the project's Web site provides plenty of papers online to read.  Link to Informedia
Internet CNN NEWSROOM (Center for Advanced Engineering Study, MIT)
This is a typical, Web-based video retrieval at the moment: search the database by some keywords, download the retrieved video clips,  then play it with plug-in software.  But the point here is that everthing is done totally automatically so no human intervention is needed - probably something required with ever updated news programs.  Keyword searching uses Excite engine.  Link to Internet CNN NEWSROOM
MBase System (Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory)
Developing audio + video based automatic video indexing techniqes. Developed nice video listing user interface (online demo available) - sensitive timeline bar showing which point keyframes are selected with options for different granularity. Also 'Comic book presentation' (manga style) browsing interface very good - it displays different sizes of keyframes (more important ones larger), rather than all keyframes single size. Drilling down to second level keyframe list is also possible.  Link to MBase System
MediaSite Publisher (MediaSite Inc.)
This video indexing/retrieval system is the commercialisation of Informedia CMU (above).  So the technology used is same as Informedia: speech recognition, natural language processing, automatic transcript generation, tight alignment between video and audio, various video abstractions (keyframe list, skims, etc.).  Link to MediaSite Publisher
Newsblaster (Columbia University)
Fully automatic web-based news system, deployed in the campus since 2001. Uses TDT and summarisation techniques to automatically generate 'event' summaries and the link to original stories coming from other news websites crawled.  Link to Newsblaster
Pop-Eye and OLIVE (TROS / TNO, Netherlands)
Pop-Eye and OLIVE are both language engineering projects, concentrating on applying natural language processing/speech recognition techniques to video indexing/retrieval.  Pop-Eye uses available subtitles of videos for indexing, OLIVE extends it to using speech recognition to complement it.  They automatically generate multilingual indexes (English, French, German and Dutch), so that the users can query in any of these languages.  Pop-Eye / OLIVE
Screening Room (Excalibur Technologies)
One of the small number of commercial video systems available at the moment.  Link to Screening Room
SMASH (Philips Research Labs, Netherlands)
Recently completed ACTS project for home video applications, including Web-VCR.  Link to SMASH
STORit (Philips Research Labs, Netherlands)
Follow-up of ACTS SMASH project (above).  Link to STORit
VICAR (Joanneum Research, Austria)
Esprit project - Video Indexing, Classification, Annotation and Retrieval.  Link to VICAR
VideoAnnEx Annotation Tool (IBM Research)
VideoAnnEx is an interactive video annotation application in which the user can play, browse the video while inserting keywords/feature lexicons, and saved as an MPEG-7 description. The tool has been used in TRECVID 2003 in developing dataset for feature extraction task.  Link to VideoAnnEx
VideoLogger (Virage Inc.)
Another commercial video DBMS available on the market.  Link to VideoLogger
VideoQ (Columbia University)
Now resolve the problem of 'query by motion' with VideoQ.  You can use a sketch-drawing tool to define objects and their visual features, then you also define the objects' motion trajectory by drawing a line.  The system will retrieve all the shots where things move like as you defined.  It has a java Web demo, so try it!  Link to VideoQ
VISION (Kansas University)
A moderate-size video project.  Anybody interested in automatic segmentation of video sequence, have a look at how it's done here.  It uses video segmenter + audio merger: segmentation using video information tends to cut too much (such as a news program where an anchor person is speaking while many different scenes are showing - they are about the same subject, so should not be segemented, but using only visual information it cuts all different shots).  So after this too much cut, use audio analysing and merge some cuts back to one unit.  Not many systems use audio information to complement indexing process.  Link to VISION
WebSEEk (Columbia University)
This interesting Web-based system is basically an image search system, but it accommodates video as well.  Spiders search the Web for image files & video clip files automatically and indexes them.  It automatically creates textual descriptions based on the found image/video files' directory names, and also visual feature indexing is done.  Searching is good fun with nice thumbnail representations of images/videos.  Complete system is operating on the Web, so you can try now.  Check how each video clip is represented as one moving thumbnail, quickly alternating key frames in the same thumbnail slot.  Link to WebSEEk



Other video browsing tools
IDIAP Content-Based Video Browser (IDIAP, Switzerland)
XML-based implementation of a video content browser from IDIAP (Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence), allowing the user to hierarchically browse the keyframes within a video.  Link to IDIAP Video Browser
Videoline (IRIT, France)
This deals with interface for time-based media such as video.  Not much details is available on its Web site, but some screen shots of their novel interfaces are worth looking at.  Link to Videoline
Salient Movies (MIT Media Lab)
One problem with video indexing/representation is that video is moving rather than static.  If we can somehow produce a static image from a moving sequence, it would be much handier.  'Mosaising technique' from Bremen University (listed above) produces a static, synthesised image from a video sequence.  A similar thing is done with Salient Movies, collecting all the salient features of moving images into a set of static pictures.  Link to Salient Movies
Video Streamer (MIT Media Lab)
Once a set of video clips are retrieved by a user query, he/she will want to have a look at the content of each clip.  When users want to 'view' the content of each video clip, certainly PLAYING it is not the only way.  Viewing the content of a video clip, there are several novel methods proposed.  Video Streamer is also suitable for this content viewing, though it's also for editing sequences.  Link to Video Streamer
MORE LINKS
Organisations & activities our Centre is involved in:

TRECVID
TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation co-ordinated by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) - we have been participating the annual activity since its start in 2001.

The Open Video Project
A shared digital video repository developed and maintained by Interaction Design Lab, University of North Carolina

 
 
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