Transforming Multimedia Structural Information into Semantics

In this paper a new approach to metadata production is presented. For this purpose, a new interactive tool for audiovisual content acquisition and classication has been developed. The user can decompose a given content into units and easily annotate each unit adding basic information such as time, place, etc. as well classication information such as event type, relationship type, etc. according to the MPEG 7 Standard. At the end of this production process, the tool automatically produces a structural description of the overall set of the annotated units. The new idea proposed in this work is to combine the intrinsic semantics of each annotated unit with the implicit semantic information derived from the structural description, hence reducing the needs to perform complex signal processing operations on the content. This aspect is really important since image and video processing is generally heavier than metadata processing and the content can be spread over a network and not made readily available at the processing point

Analysis of Video Content for a Multi-Layer Navigation of Multimedia Documents

This paper describes a set of automatic extraction tools so as to generate a three-layer organization of video documents. The underlying coarse to fine description allows for a fast navigation throughout the document, depending on the degree of details which is desired. Once the time-codes of the individual segments for each layer of the hierarchy have been identified, it is possible to map them into a Description Scheme (DS), which maintains the hierarchy and linear structure of the video document. This structural DS serves the role of a table of content for the multimedia document, the same way it is done in books. The particular interest of the proposed approach lies in the automatic solutions that can be used to generate the different segments at each level of the DS, and in the browsing tool that can be easily derived to navigate throughout the document

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio