Video Database Design: Convivial Storytelling Tools

Traditionally video and film stories have been developed by a single author for a single release movie. Increasingly, video databases will be constructed as content libraries. These libraries will be used to deliver personalized messages to people who know very little about video story construction or editing. The challenge in making these systems usable is to develop story telling tools for those unsophisticated users. Story generation presumes some input by the user, first to create appropriate video description and second to suggest a story to tell. This paper offers an overview of some methods of description which have been associated with particular types of video logging and databases in the past. A general problem with these systems has been how to develop video annotations with efficiency and consistency. A new approach, story based annotation, is proposed. In this method a tool set is used for creating a top down story abstraction. Coupled with automatic database selection, this tool set allows the user to encode story based annotations and expert knowledge about editing into the database while producing stories. As the database grows, it becomes structured and annotated by a process appropriate to the medium, namely storytelling. This structuring process optimizes the database for retrieval of video in a story form. Introduction: What is a Video Database? The evolution of large electronic media databases for application in news, ethnographic research, education, and training, as well as for a wide range of personal assistants as in travel, real-estate, and other niche video-on-demand markets has been anticipated for almost a quarter of a century. In laboratories throughout the world, research in digital video signals has focused on hardware for storage, transmission, and display; on software for image creation, database management, and navigation; and on design principles for interactive story forms. Despite rapid progress in the development of digital video systems, content construction remains difficult. One way to think about a digital video system is in the context of a database. Such a system contains a large collection of information elements of a certain granularity. These elements are described according to a range of attributes and can be accessed according to the intent of the user. Who will produce these large digital video databases and how will they affect our communication landscape? Who will have access to such a database and for how much? What tools are needed to use this database effectively? What can we learn about story creation which will affect the content and navigation of future databases? These questions lead us to examine possible video database applications. The most frequently proposed benchmark for digital video technology has been movieson-demand. This service will allow the consumer to watch what she wants, when she wants, where she wants, hopefully at a reasonable cost, so long as what she wants is one of 500 or 1000 movie titles. From a consumer stand point, this application does little to change our perception of television entertainment. However, from a research perspective, the application has pushed the technical framework for variable bandwidth digital video servers. Today commercial on-line databases for still pictures are beginning to appear. For example, the Kodak Picture Exchange provides publishers of all sorts with access to an electronic photographic archive The client can search the Kodak repository for a particular photographer or theme, and receive low and medium resolution images over the network. This enables designers to work more efficiently and intimately with their client, while keeping an eye on cost. The negative need only be ordered when decisions about the final publication have been made. Similar still picture services are expected to be developed for news in the near future. Stills and movies are contained objects; they are complete stories. What happens when we distinguish between story granularity and shot granularity. Consider a database of motion picture clips documenting world geography and culture. Or consider a database of my home video and clips I have captured from television. Or consider a database of video from which we can learn about the technology which goes into building a space ship. Video clips differ from stills or a pre-edited movie in that they constitute fragments of larger stories. As a communications resource, this type of database opens pathways to information and learning. Once a large collection of data is created, there is still the challenge of making the information usable. Users of information repositories face three daunting problems: • How do I know what is there? • How do I find anything there? • How can I find what I want? Any database system must deal with these three problems in order to make the content contained within it available for use.