**PRESS RELEASE -- AUG. 18, 2005 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**

**U.S. National Library of Medicine Gathers Video Archivists to Advance
Video Preservation Technologies**

*Bethesda, Maryland, Aug. 1, 2005.* A meeting at NLM on the NIH campus
included the first public demonstration of real-time, full-screen,
mathematically-lossless video compression and decompression based on the
Motion JPEG 2000 (MJ2) standard. This was demonstrated by Justin Dávila
of Media Matters, Inc., with a prototype PC board, using a short clip of
a dancer crashing through a "glass" window (shown). In one pass, output
from a tape deck (in SD SDI form) generated a compressed video file and
a separate broadcast-quality digital audio file for archival disk
storage. Subsequently, the files were played back, uncompressing the
video on the fly, to a studio monitor for all to view.

![](media/image1.png){width="3.2583333333333333in" height="3.1in"}

Another demonstration, by Carnegie Mellon researcher Alexander
Hauptmann, showed recent work in automatic extraction of metadata
(structured information) from video. Possible applications in
institutionalized patient management included automatically detecting
behaviors from surveillance video, with image redaction to lessen loss
of privacy.

The occasion was an August 1 meeting of those involved in the long term
preservation of videos and films. About fifty participants explored the
potential of lossless, on-disk video storage in light of the "twilight
of tape" as a cost-effective storage media. Barriers to adopting
lossless algorithms were identified, and specific directions to overcome
them suggested.

The meeting, "Getting to Disk-based Lossless Digital Video Compression",
was hosted by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, itself much
involved in preserving historic and contemporary biomedical films and
videos, and seeking pathways to digital repositories. The
by-invitation-only regional gathering had representatives from a number
of East Coast video archives, including the Library of Congress, the
National Archives and Records Administration, the National Holocaust
Museum, PBS, Folkstream/UNC, Rutgers, Yale, NYU, John Hopkins, and the
University of Maryland at College Park.

The meeting kicked off with a 3-part talk by NLM hosts. Paul Theerman,
Head of Images and Archives in the History of Medicine Division,
outlined the NLM's and NIH's collection and preservation efforts. Walter
Cybulski, of Preservation and Collection Management, reviewed the
endemic problem of film and tape deterioration and equipment
obsolescence, particularly for analog video. Software developer Glenn
Pearson, of the Communications Engineering Branch, sketched lossless
digital migration as a solution, observing that lossless compression, if
not affordable today, will be tomorrow. Since the cost per bit of disk
storage is plunging much faster than tape storage, over the next ten
years, hierarchical disk-to-offline-tape storage systems would likely be
replaced by a hierarchy of flash-disk to powered-on-request hard disk.

Following this introduction came sessions chaired by Margaret Byrnes and
George Thoma, including the Media Matters demonstration. Yale
University's Joanne Rudof spoke of plans to use this new capability this
fall to digitally archive some of Yale's collection of Holocaust
survivor testimonials. She discussed her experience with other existing
parts of the Media Matters' SAMMA system: robotic VHS tape loading,
cleaning/triage, time base correction, and capture of quality-control
metadata. Other current lossy digital archiving workflows, and future
plans, were shared by NYU's Melitte Buchman (who showed high-bandwidth
video clips of flamboyantly-costumed performers), and PBS's Jim Kutzner,
with input from WGBH's video archivist Dave MacCarn.

Xerox Research Fellow Rob Buckley stressed the advantages of JPEG 2000
image compression, that lets portions be extracted "scalably", so that a
low-bandwidth, lossy stream can be extracted from a high-quality
lossless file. JPEG 2000 is used to compress individual frames in both
MJ2 and (in a digital cinema content) MXF file formats. He also reviewed
the color spaces needed for quality video and scanned-film masters.

![](media/image2.jpeg){width="4.565277777777778in"
height="2.7402777777777776in"}

Turning to metadata issues, Rutger's Grace Agnew, principal investigator
for the Moving Images Collection project, surveyed the dominant
methodologies, such as MPEG-7. NLM's Pearson, a contributor to the Open
JPEG project, detailed the capabilities of Motion JPEG 2000 files to
contain metadata, identifying shortcomings, possible workarounds, and
areas where improvements to the standards seem warranted.

CMU's Hauptmann demonstrated the "Informedia" project's automatic
extraction of metadata from video. Over the years, the project has built
a 10TB library of compressed video from satellite feeds of evening CNN
and other shows. After capture, scenes are analyzed against a
thousand-keyword controlled vocabulary, e.g., "outdoors", by
speech-to-text conversion (from English and other languages), language
understanding, and image recognition programs. While acknowledging that
intelligence and defense agencies are customers of
recognize/track/analyze research, his talk focused on patient management
applications, dubbed "CareMedia". For example, automated analysis of
surveillance videos in a nursing home could conceivably detect changes
in routine behavioral patterns, alerting doctors to changes in their
patients. Ways to mitigate loss of privacy were demonstrated. For
example, people other than the patient of interest could be
face-pixelated, or elided entirely. Shown was a mockup, in which a
person to hide was first hand-selected, but then automatically tracked
within the rest of a scene. Other anonymizing methods involved detecting
and rendering only the edges of objects and people, or extracting
behavior patterns (e.g., "tooth brushing") without retaining the video.

![](media/image3.jpeg){width="2.2111111111111112in"
height="2.6819444444444445in"}

The afternoon's general discussion, led by Thoma and Pearson (shown),
engaged a number of these issues. For example, one topic was the status
of emerging "trusted repositories", where moving images and metadata,
and projects incorporating them, can be held. Such information can
include rights, provenance, contacts, and financial data. This was part
of a broader theme of developments in metadata. A number of metadata
schemes were mentioned, with perhaps MPEG-7 getting the most attention.
Roadblocks to synchronizing metadata information (in MPEG-7 and other
forms) with video need to be surmounted.

As next steps, the participants suggested taking up with pertinent
standards bodies certain specific improvements for the MXF and MJ2 file
formats, and encouraging, through initiatives of government and other
archives, the creation of tools that will make the widespread adoption
of disk-based lossless compression possible.

For more, see the web site at
http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/VideoArchivists2005/![](media/image4.jpeg){width="4.5375in"
height="2.0548611111111112in"}