The vision digital video library

The goal of the VISION (Video Indexing for SearchIng Over Networks) project is to demonstrate the technology necessary for a comprehensive, on-line digital video library. We have developed automatic mechanisms to populate the library and provide content-based search and retrieval of video 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 has also been 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-based exploration of the library over networks of varying bandwidths. 1This paper is a revised version of "VISION: A Digital Video Library System," W. Li, S. Gauch, J. Gauch and K.M. Pua, presented at ACM Digital Libraries '96.