Smith focuses on the importance of digital video libraries to the evolution of the Internet. This application is a primary technology driver because of its severe processing requirements and high demands for bandwidth and quality of service. He describes various techniques for analyzing video streams, many of which do the analysis of streams in their compressed forms. These tools can partition streams into shots and scenes, construct crude storyboards, and transcode a stream from one representation to another without decompressing it. He discusses recent advances in content-based querying enabled by these tools and other techniques.
Stone addresses problems related to accessing images on the Internet by content.
To reduce processing requirements, current trends try to represent images with small sets of descriptors such as color, shape, and texture, which can be searched rather quickly. An alternate approach is to retain more details and analyze an image during a query, rather than rely on summary descriptors to give the content of an image. Future digital image libraries will most likely incorporate both approaches to allow the greatest flexibility in trading off query precision and response time. Weinstein et al. Diversity creates a problem because the means for access will depend on the library, and will vary widely across libraries.