Development of A Video Database System HongJiang Zhang, Stephen W. Smoliar, Jian Hua Wu and Chien Yong Low Institute of Systems Science, National University of Singapore Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Kent Ridge, Singapore 0511 Republic of Singapore 1. Introduction With rapid advances in electronic imaging, data storage, data compression, and telecommunications, our libraries are becoming digital and multimedia. As more and more multimedia data are acquired, managing and manipulating them becomes an important issue to be resolved before we can take full advantage of their information content.
Video is the most difficult of all the media resources to manage.
Only an indexed video can effectively support retrieval and distribution in digital library and multimedia information systems. Thus, constructing an effective video library will require a set of power tools whose functionality will support the tasks of parsing, indexing, retrieval, and browsing for video source material. We have developed tools for all of these tasks which will be discussed in this paper. Case studies have provided the primary means for testing our results, and we shall discuss one case study involving the construction of a database of video source material intended for use in news and documentary production. While fully automatic content analysis of video source material is still not possible in general, we have developed a set of algorithms which make it easier for a user to detect and locate such semantic primitives.