At the review the project was passed with flying colours and with lots of praise by the reviewers. For me, representing one of the User Partners, the final demonstration at the review revealed possibilities that I had not quite seen during the scope of the project. Quite natural as our criticism and demands had forced the Technical partners to developments that were impressive. I feel that we here really have innovations especially in the search methods. R eplacing many routine actions, the Video Navigator automates a part of the cataloguing work that today is still done manually by documentalists.
Information is extracted automatically from the video stream in three main steps.
First the video is segmented into its single shots. From each shot a number of representative keyframes is selected. Second, the Video Navigator computes an index for each keyframe. The index is based on a wide variety of features, such as frame colour, distribution of brightness over a frame, camera movements, textures and changes in contrast over a shot. Taken together, the features are integrated into a rich index structure that is linked to the time-code of the original video tape.