Real Time Video Scene Detection and Classification

The VISION (Video Indexing for Searching Over Networks) digital video library system has been developed in our laboratory as a testbed for evaluating automatic and comprehensive mechanisms for video archive creation and content-based search, filtering and retrieval of video over local and wide area networks. In order to provide access to video footage within seconds of broadcast, we have developed a new pipelined digital video processing architecture which is capable of digitizing, processing, indexing, and compressing video in real time on an inexpensive general purpose computer. These videos were automatically partitioned into short scenes using video, audio and closed-caption information. The resulting scenes are indexed based on their captions and stored in a multimedia database. A clientserver-based graphical user interface was developed to enable users to remotely search this archive and view selected video segments over networks of different bandwidths. Additionally, VISION classifies the incoming videos with respect to a taxonomy of categories and will selectively send users videos which match their individual profiles.