A survey of technologies for parsing and indexing digital video

In the future we envision systems that will provide video information delivery services to customers on a very large scale. These systems must provide customers with mechanisms to select programs of their choice from live broadcasts, Customers should also be provided with easy means of browsing and accessing prerecorded digital data (e.g., distributed digital multimedia libraries), and downloading data from other information sources. To be viable for such large information sets, these systems must understand customer preferences and tailor the available information to the customer's needs. To support this vision, a number of issues must be addressed and obstacles overcome. Intuitive interfaces, powerful query formulation and evaluation techniques, comprehensive data models, and flexible presentation functionalities must be developed. To realize these components, an effective query evaluation engine with the capabilities of query resolution in different content-specific formats (e.g., by graphics, by image, by sound) and in different domain-specific models (e.g., database of movies, database of newsclips) should be present. Additionally, the digital video database will require an efficient indexing system for easy access to the stored information. In this paper we discuss existing research trends in this area and requirements for future data delivery systems. An overview of video indexing is presented followed by a discussion on current indexing techniques. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.