Browsing the world wide web in a non-visual environment

Presented at the 4th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Palo Alto, California, November 2-5, 1997.We have been investigating building a non-visual browsing environment for the WWW, specifically one that relies heavily on audio for information delivery and feedback. The idea is that with an unobtrusive browser, a user may listen to the WWW in the background, just as many people now listen to the radio while doing other tasks. This paper discusses two of the major issues which are faced in such a system, how to render HTML documents using audio, and how to provide a non-visual browsing interface for the WWW. We have implemented a prototype system as part of the Web-based Interactive Radio Environment, which includes our approaches to these issues

Feature management for large video databases

Large video databases, as well as many other applications involving video, such as multimedia, training, and “movie-on-demand ” systems, require efficient steps to manipulate the enormous amount of data associated with full motion video. In this paper the incoming video is systematically and efficiently reduced via a frame selection procedure which takes advantage of the fact that the incoming video is encoded using one of several existing DCT-based standards. The procedure is performed in the frequency domain prior to video decoding. Further refinement in the frame selection step is achieved using a robust metric based upon the color histogram of the selected subset of decoded frames. The procedure is presented in detail and several examples are exhibited. 1