Video as scholarly material in the digital library

The standard method for making the full content of audio and video material searchable is to annotate it with human-generated meta-data that describes the content in a way that the search can understand, as is done in the creation of multimedia CD-ROMs. However, for the huge amounts of data that could usefully be included in digital video and audio libraries, the cost of producing this meta-data is prohibitive. In the Informedia Digital Video Library, the production of the meta-data supporting the library interface is automated using techniques derived from artificial intelligence (AI) research. By applying speech recognition together with natural language processing, information retrieval, and image analysis, an interface has been produced that helps users locate the information they want, and navigate or browse the digital video library more effectively. Specific interface components include automatic titles, filmstrips, video skims, word location marking, and representative frames for shots. Both the user interface and the information retrieval engine within Informedia are designed for use with automatically derived meta-data, much of which depends on speech recognition for its production. Some experimental information retrieval results will be given, supporting a basic premise of the Informedia project: That speech recognition generated transcripts can make multimedia material searchable. The Informedia project emphasizes the integration of speech recognition, image processing, natural language processing, and information retrieval to compensate for deficiencies in these individual technologies. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The number of channels of digital television is increasing, particularly the number that are free-to-air. However due to the nature of broadcasting, this morass of information is not, for the main part, organized---it is principally a succession of images and sound transmitted as multiplexed streams of data. Compare this deluge that terrestrially bombards our homes with the information available in the digital libraries we access over the Internet---stored using software purpose built to help organize carefully curated sets of documents. This project brings together these two seemingly incompatible concepts to develop a software environment that concurrently captures all the available live television channels---so a user does not need to proactively choose what to record---and segments them into files which are then imported into a digital video library with a user interface designed to work from a multimedia remote control. A shifting time-based window of all recordings is maintained---we settled on from the last two weeks so as to be practicably operable on a regular desktop PC. The system leverages off the information contained in the electronic program guide and the video recordings to generate metadata suitable for the digital library. A user evaluation of the developed prototype showed a high level of participant satisfaction across a range of attributes, notably date-based searching.

Technology usage is changing rapidly and is becoming a more mobile, more social and more multimedia-based experience. This is especially true in the area of content creation where mobile social applications used by crowds of people are challenging traditional ways of creating and distributing content, especially for applications like news dissemination. Libraries have traditionally functioned as repositories where the information content of a society is analysed, curated, organised and stored, acting as a permanent record of what is to be remembered from a society. How can this function be achieved by present-day libraries attempting to cope with mobile, social, multimedia content who's nature and utility of which change the type of information we wish to curate and store? This information is both dynamic and organic, posing challenges to the more fixed models of information in digital libraries. In this article we describe two digital library systems that archive video content from the sports domain, and which support user annotations and merging of diverse information sources in an integrated way. We report on analysis of the deployment of these two systems and highlight how they extend the traditional role of a (digital) library.

A comparative study between two types of tool wear monitoring systems for milling processes is introduced in this paper. The suggested sensory fusion approach includes the implementation of an infrared camera, in addition to force, vibration, sound and acoustic emission sensors. The majority of the research work available in literature and industry focuses on using one dimensional signals, such as force, vibration. Two dimensional data, such as infrared and visual images, are limited in literature in relation to machining operations. This work compares between one dimensional and two dimensional data for the development of a tool condition monitoring system for milling processes. The paper presents a comparative study between the performance of signal and image processing algorithms using neural networks. Fourier Transformation and Wavelets analysis are used to process one dimensional and Two dimensional data respectively. The results indicate that two dimensional data obtained from infrared images has significant capability in comparison to one dimensional data for the detection of tool wear for the selected image and signal processing algorithms.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to report on a user-centred analysis of video digital libraries and to present users’ criteria based on concepts emerging directly from the responses of study participants. As a time-based and multi-channeled format, video warrants considerations for information delivery through interactive tools such as digital libraries.Design/methodology/approach– A survey method was used to collect open-ended responses from participants. Content analysis was performed on the responses, and categories then emerged to form the coding scheme where simple and weighted frequencies were calculated to obtain a ranked set of users’ criteria. Cohen’sκwas 0.87, indicative of high-level of inter-coder reliability. In the end, 81 participants contributed a total of 385 open-ended responses, which were all then analysed and coded.Findings– The emergent coding method and continuous refinements to the coding scheme ultimately produced 28 criteria (subcategories) under four primary categories. Criteria corresponding to “retrieval functionality” of video digital libraries emerged as the highest, or most frequently referenced, primary category, while the “user interface”, “collection qualities”, and “user support” followed, respectively.Research limitations/implications– The primary research contribution is a baseline for video digital libraries that can be applicable throughout design and evaluation. Future studies can utilise findings presented here as guidance for the initial design stages and/or for assessing systems via targeted evaluations.Originality/value– While users’ criteria of digital libraries have been analysed from non-visual contexts, they have not been directly assessed as they pertain to users’ experiences and perceptions with video, which is needed as the nature and structure of video can influence users and use.

The Information Age is fully upon us. A recent article noted that there are perhaps 50 million people using the Internet on a regular basis, and That “the current growth rate is about 15% per month (!) and this could well continue until almost all of those in the ‘developed world’ are connected” [FM94, p. 30]. In addition, the digital domain consists not only of text but increasingly of other media representations, from graphics images to audio to motion video. As the amount of information and number of users exponentially escalate, more attention focuses on the basic problems of information management: How do you digitize information? How can you then visualize it and find what you need? How do you use and manipulate it effectively? How is it stored and managed? The proliferation of technical articles and special issues addressing these questions underscore their importance; see for example the special issue on Content-based retrieval [Nar95] or digital libraries [F+95]. This chapter will survey some of that work, especially that which relates to the treatment of video and the use of digital video libraries For education.

Many commercial and academic disciplines need digital video libraries. Such libraries must provide the user with the opportunity to manipulate the material non-linearly. This paper discusses digital video libraries and various non-linear services these libraries will provide. The architectural components of such libraries are discussed and a model of user access is developed. Results from caching experiments utilizing that model are reported for several usage patterns and four cache organizations.© (1996) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

The Informedia Digital Video Library Project is developing new technologies for creating full-content search and retrieval digital video libraries. Working in collaboration with WQED Pittsburgh, the project is creating a testbed that will enable K-12 students to access, explore, and retrieve science and mathematics materials from the digital video library. The library will initially contain 1,000 hours of video from the archives of project partners: WQED, Fairfax Co. VA Schools' Electronic BBC-produced video courses. (Industrial partners include Digital Equipment Corp., Bell Atlantic, Intel Corp., and Microsoft, Inc.) This library will be installed at Winchester Thurston School, an independent K-12 school in Pittsburgh.

The increased availability and usage of on-line digital video has created a need for automated video content analysis techniques including indexing and retrieving. Most research on video content involves automatically detecting the boundaries between camera shots. After shot detection there is a need for shots indexing in a library which enables retrieving for the required stream based on shot. There is a need to build an efficient digital library for those shots, saving the proper features for each shot/frames, which will enable efficient retrieval for user's requirement. This paper presents an automation technique for video indexing and creation of a digital library. We will present how to detect shots cuts and features, which will be saved for the video shots/frames. Also build a video digital library composed of the stream shots/frames plus wavelet coefficients for video stream shot's key or all frames (for full search function in all frames of the indexed video). The digital library represents full video streams frames indexed into shots with overhead in the stored size just 16.2 % as wavelet coefficients. The retrieving efficiency for a shot while having an input frame is ranged from 100%, if the input frame is saved keyframe, down to 94% if the input frame is any other frame. Our digital library is valid for any number of video streams, any number of shots/ streams and any number of frames/shot.

The color appearance of digital video imagery acquired from analog sources is affected by intrinsic device imperfections. Although the human visual system (HVS) is capable of perceiving color variations when comparing different acquisitions of the same video, it is able to identify the colors in an isolated image as well. Color based computer vision processes applied within digital video libraries do not have this capability and their performance is severely reduced. This paper presents a method for modeling the intrinsic color appearance given by acquisition devices. It is based on the approximation of the distribution of colors generated by a device using a mixture of Gaussians in RGB space. Its parameters are encoded in a specifically designed pattern, which provides a dense estimation of the distribution of colors along the whole RGB space. In this way, the model can be attached to every acquired video in order to put its original color appearance on record. The approximation by mixtures of Gaussians lets us define transformations between them that preserve the identity of colors. This fact is shown in the case of skin color segmentation, where the underlying concept of color is captured from samples obtained by a particular device. Other applications of color correction in digital video are pointed out in this paper as well.

The automatic extraction and recognition of news captions and annotations can be of great help locating topics of interest in digital news video libraries. To achieve this goal, we present a technique, called Video OCR (Optical Character Reader), which detects, extracts, and reads text areas in digital video data. In this paper, we address problems, describe the method by which Video OCR operates, and suggest applications for its use in digital news archives. To solve two problems of character recognition for videos, low-resolution characters and extremely complex backgrounds, we apply an interpolation filter, multiframe integration and character extraction filters. Character segmentation is performed by a recognition-based segmentation method, and intermediate character recognition results are used to improve the segmentation. We also include a method for locating text areas using text-like properties and the use of a language-based postprocessing technique to increase word recognition rates. The overall recognition results are satisfactory for use in news indexing. Performing Video OCR on news video and combining its results with other video understanding techniques will improve the overall understanding of the news video content.

This paper proposes an abstraction mechanism of the low-level digital video features for the automatic retrievals of the explosion scenes from the digital video library. In the proposed abstraction mechanism, the regional dominant colors of the key frame and the motion energy of the shot are defined as the primary low-level visual features of the shot for the explosion scene retrievals. The regional dominant colors of shot are selected by dividing its key frame image into several regions and extracting their regional dominant colors, and the motion energy of the shot is defined as the edge image differences between key frame and its neighboring frame. Upon the extensive experimental results, we could argue that the recall and precision of the proposed abstraction and detecting algorithm are about 0.8, and also found that they are not sensitive to the thresholds.KeywordsColor HistogramEdge ImageRetrieval AlgorithmEdge PixelDominant ColorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The Yearbook of Medical Informatics is published annually by the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and contains a selection of recent excellent papers on medical informatics research (http://www.med.uni-heidelberg.de/mi/yearbook/index.htm). The special topic of the just published Yearbook 2001 is "Digital Libraries and Medicine". Digital libraries have changed dramatically and will continue to change the way we work with medical knowledge. The selected papers present recent research and new results on digital libraries. As usual, the Yearbook 2001 also contains a variety of papers on other subjects relevant to medical informatics, such as Electronic Patient Records, Health Information Systems, Health and Clinical Management, Decision Support Systems, Education, as well as Image and Signal Processing. This paper will briefly introduce the contributions covering digital libraries and will show how medical informatics research contributes to this important topic.

Periodic broadcast and scheduled multicast have been shown to be very effective in reducing the demand on server bandwidth. While periodic broadcast is better for popular videos, scheduled multicast is more suitable for less popular ones. Work has also been done to show that a hybrid of these techniques offer the best performance. Existing hybrid schemes, however, assume that the characteristic of the workload does not change with time. This assumption is not true for many applications, such as movie on demand, digital video libraries, or electronic commerce. In this paper, we show that existing scheduled multicast techniques are not suited for hybrid designs. To address this issue, we propose a new approach and use it to design an adaptive hybrid strategy. Our technique adjusts itself to cope with a changing workload. We provide simulation results to demonstrate that the proposed technique is significantly better than the best static approach in terms of service latency, throughput, defection rate, and unfairness.

This paper presents results of a case study that addresses many issues surrounding the difficult task of preservation in a digital library. We focus on a subset of these issues as they apply to the preservation of scholarly articles encoded in Web standards. We also describe the two common preservation mechanisms, emulation and migration, as well as our selection of the latter for our particular case. Finally, we compare two approaches to migration, automatic and manual, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses in our context. We show that consistent use of open standards leads to more efficient migration processes and issue a "call to arms" to the digital preservation community to ensure that scholarly material on the Web can be preserved for future generations