A Hierarchical Keyframe User Interface for Browsing Video over the Internet

We present an interactive content-based video browser allowing fast, non linear and hierarchical navigation of video over the Internet through multiple levels of key-frames that provide a visual summary of video content. Our method is based on an XML framework, dynamically generated parameterized XSL style sheets, and SMIL. The architecture is designed to incorporate additional recognized features (e.g. from audio) in future versions. The last part of this paper describes a user study which indicates that this browsing interface is more comfortable to use and approximately three times faster for locating remembered still images within videos compared to the simple VCR controls built into RealPlayer.