The Excalibur VAE is a software engine that analyzes analog and digital video. Cogs can be mixed and matched depending upon the need of the application. On detecting a particular event, the engine will report the occurrence of the event to the controlling program along with other pertinent information about the event. Using Excalibur's pattern recognition software, frames are analyzed individually or within cached sequences to determine the presence of events. Events are then returned to the controlling program where they can be acted upon programmatically.
Some operations are more compute-intensive than others, depending on the selected cogs.
For example, executing on 200 MHz Pentiums and up, the storyboard cog can maintain 30 fps analysis of analog video, while digital video can be analyzed at faster than real-time. Additionally, the VAE has built-in settings for different video genres such as animation, drama, documentary, etc. These optional presets adjust the sensitivity of the engine based upon thousands of hours of analysis we have performed on a wide array of video sources. The DirectShow filter allows the engine to be plugged into any DirectShow filter graph. If you are a programmer, you can use the VAE in a variety of applications where understanding the structure of video is important.