Video Library

Abstract: A fundamental task in video analysis is to extract structures from the video to facilitate user's access (browsing and retrieval). Motivated by the important role that the table of content (ToC) plays in a book, in this paper, we introduce the concept of ToC in the video domain. Some existing approaches implicitly use the ToC, but are mainly limited to low-level entities (e.g., shots and key frames). The drawbacks are that low-level structures (1) contain too many entries to be efficiently presented to the user; and (2) do not capture the underlying semantic structure of the video based on which the user may wish to browse/retrieve. To address these limitations, in this paper, we present an effective semantic-level ToC construction technique based on intelligent unsupervised clustering. It has the characteristics of better modeling the time locality and scene structure. Experiments based on real-world movie videos validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Examples are given to demonstrate the usage of the scene-based ToC in facilitating user's access to the video.

Abstract: In order to provided information for helping a viewing user remember the contents of past viewing of a video program, in an easy-to-comprehend form and in as small an information amount as possible, a video terminal device capable of controlling video playback by a controller stores a position of the video program at which it was interrupted by the user. The interrupted position is stored in a video library of a video server. Images representative of a portion from the start or another position of the interrupted video program up to the interrupted position are extracted by a video digest making program. The extracted representative images are represented by a list display based on reduced icons or a digest image. The list or the digest image is displayed before resuming the interrupted video program.

Abstract: A method and system for providing access to a plurality of video programs of a video library in accordance with viewer preferences. Members of the Home Video Club of the invention may phone in or write in their video program choices and the received viewer choices are tabulated in accordance with a selection priority scheme at the transmission side so that the most popular video programs as determined by the voter choices may be broadcast more regularly for the viewer's convenience. For this purpose, a "prime time" viewing period is defined in accordance with the viewer preferences so that the more popular video programs can be shown more frequently to meet viewer demand. The selected video programs are broadcast over rented or dedicated cable television channels for reception by the viewer. The received video programs may then be recorded and time-shifted so that the viewers may view the video programs at their leisure. The technique of this invention is particularly advantageous in that the broadcast system is directly responsive to the viewer preferences and is dynamically programmable in accordance with those preferences so that differing numbers of regular and prime time programs may be viewed in a given time period. Revenue may be raised by charging for the viewer's calls and by the subscription fee for joining the Home Video Club.

Abstract: A video on demand network (VODN), transmits video signals (VS) to user stations (US11, . . . , US2N) pursuant to the receipt of control signals (CS) issued by these user stations. In order to optimize the retrieval costs, this video on demand network maintains a large video library in a central video server (CS) and stores locally popular video signals in a plurality of local distributed video servers (DS1/2) from which the latter video signals are transmitted to the user stations. The video signals provided by the local distributed servers are updated from the central server based upon the changing popularity of the video signals. The present invention proposes in particular to store the video signals in the local distributed servers in random access read/write memories (HDA), e.g., electronic RAMs, magnetic or optical disks, and/or the like, from which the video signals can flexibly be supplied on-line to the user stations and to store the video signals in the central server in sequential access memories, e.g. Digital Audio Tapes (DAT) and CD-ROMs (CDR), providing cheap mass storage.