This paper presents an overview of the Físchlár digital library, a collection of over 300 hours of broadcast TV content which has been indexed to allow searching, browsing and playback of video. The system is in daily use by over 1,500 users on our University campus and is used for

teaching and learning, for research, and for entertainment. It is shortly to be made available to University libraries elsewhere in Ireland. The infrastructure we use is a Gigabit ETHERNET backbone and a conventional web browser for searching and browsing video content, with a browser plug-in for streaming video. As well as providing an overview of the system, the paper concentrates on the complimentary navigation techniques of browsing and searching which are supported within Físchlár

Smeaton, Alan F.

English

DCU Online Research Access Service

The Físchlár Digital Library: Networked Access to a Video Archiveof TV NewsProfessor Alan F. SmeatonCentre for Digital Video ProcessingDublin City UniversityGlasnevin, Dublin 9, IRELAND.e: Alan.Smeaton@DCU.ie    t: +353-1-7005262    f: +353-1-7005442Abstract:  This paper presents an overview of the Físchlár digital library, a collection of over 300hours of broadcast TV content which has been indexed to allow searching, browsing and playback ofvideo.  The system is in daily use by over 1,500 users on our University campus and is used forteaching and learning, for research, and for entertainment.  It is shortly to be made available toUniversity libraries elsewhere in Ireland.  The infrastructure we use is a Gigabit ETHERNET backboneand a conventional web browser for searching and browsing video content, with a browser plug-in forstreaming video.  As well as providing an overview of the system, the paper concentrates on thecomplimentary navigation techniques of browsing and searching which are supported within Físchlár.Keywords:  Digital video browsing;  digital video libraries; digital video searching;1. Introduction to FíschlárThe Físchlár system is a library of digital video information which records, analyses, indexes, storesand provides streamed playback as well as browsing and searching, on broadcast TV materials in aUniversity campus environment.  At any point in time there are between 300 and 400 hours of TVcontent available for playback to a userbase of over 1,500 registered users, though only about 1,000of those are actually active and regular participants.  The video streaming technology behind theFíschlár system, a SUN Enterprise server running the ORACLE video server, is capable of supportingover 250 simultaneous streams of MPEG-1 encoded video, each stream requiring 1.5 Mbps.  Thenetworking technology we use is a Gigabit ETHERNET backbone with 100 Mbps links to eachdesktop machine, though we also have some users to interact with Físchlár using a laptop over awireless LAN.  The interface to Físchlár is via a conventional web browser, either Netscape or InternetExplorer, with an ORACLE plug-in to allow streaming of video.There are two versions of the Físchlár system in use on ourcampus… “Físchlár” allows recording, browsing andplayback of TV programmes transmitted on any of 8terrestrial TV channels.  “Físchlár-News” automaticallyrecords the main evening news on the nationalbroadcaster’s main TV station and the archive of TV newshas now grown to be almost 1 year in size (c.170 hours ofnews content).  As each program scheduled for recordingby Físchlár is transmitted, it is digitised into MPEG-1 formatand then submitted to an analysis phase during which weautomatically detect the boundaries between differentcamera shots.  For shots over a threshold length weautomatically select a single frame as the keyframe whosecontent is somehow indicative of the content of the wholeshot.  The entire TV programme can then be presented toa user as a storyboard of keyframes, either the full set ofkeyframes (perhaps 200-250 such keyframes for a 30minute episode of a soap opera) or an abstracted subset of 20 or 30.  This is illustrated in Figure 1.To support user browsing through these keyframes we have developed several keyframe browserinterfaces from which the user can choose, and a screenshot of one of these is shown in Figure 2.Físchlár is used by a large part of the  University community for teaching and learning, for research,and for entertainment. Físchlár is used to record and allow playback of TV programs as part ofcourses on film and TV production. Students and Faculty use Físchlár-News to access the archive ofTV news and of course people living in the University’s residences use it for entertainment. However,Figure 1: Shot boundary detection andkeyframe identificationwhile it is useful as web-based video-on-demand with keyframe browsing, what makes it unusual andwhat is the focus of our research is the way in which users can access video material.2.  Information Access in FíschlárKeyframe browsing through several hundreds of keyframes for each of several hundreds of archivedTV programs offers limited possibilities for navigation through the archive.  To compliment thebrowsing facilites we are developing search tools for video digital libraries.  We capture the closedcaptions associated with 6 TV channels 24x7 and we link these to the archived broadcast.  In this waywe can support text-basedsearching through the textcaption archive with relevantvideo clips as “answers” toqueries.  However, that’sjust the start of ourwork on analysing videoin order to supportsearching/browsing. Wehave developed andtested techniques fornews storysegmentation,segmentation ofprogrammes into sceneswhich are groups ofshote, counting thenumber of human facesin a shot, speech-musicdiscrimination, speakeridentification, cameramotion detection anddetection of the amountof object motion inshots.  We are alsoworking on sophisticatedobject and shape detection and have been able to demonstrate this as a detector whichrecognises the appearance of either Bart or Homer Simpson in “The Simpsons”, in realtime.All these image and audio analysis techniques run completely automatically and as theyare developed into robust and effective implementations they open up for us thepossibility of linking together related “chunks” of video, just as we have linking betweenrelated pieces of text on the www.  From the user’s perspective this offers searching,browsing and following hyperlinks as possible navigational tools through a video archive.The technical challenges associated with the capture, compression, storage, streaming,transmission and playback of video are solved or close to being solved. Our plans are tomove to MPEG-4 encoding and playback as soon as players, streamers and compressiontechniques are more freely available but MPEG-1 has allowed us deploy Físchlár for thelast 2-and-a-half years and to build up a userbase and observe, first hand, how peoplewant to do content access to digital video. We have operated in an environment which isa technical luxury when it comes to networking issues with a fast LAN and ignoring thereal problems of networking to a larger, more dispersed community.  Físchlár is ground-breaking in that it is a real system used by real users who have real information needsbut it is also unique for the sophisticated analysis and content navigation tools we’redeveloping and layering onto an operational system.Acknowlegdement: The support of the Informatics Research Initiative of EnterpriseIreland is gratefully acknowledged.Figure 2: Screendump of Físchlár browser and playback window

The Físchlár digital library: networked access to a video archive of TV news

This paper presents an overview of the Físchlár digital library, a collection of over 300 hours of broadcast TV content which has been indexed to allow searching, browsing and playback of video. The system is in daily use by over 1,500 users on our University campus and is used for\ud
teaching and learning, for research, and for entertainment. It is shortly to be made available to University libraries elsewhere in Ireland. The infrastructure we use is a Gigabit ETHERNET backbone and a conventional web browser for searching and browsing video content, with a browser plug-in for streaming video. As well as providing an overview of the system, the paper concentrates on the complimentary navigation techniques of browsing and searching which are supported within Físchlár

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This paper presents an overview of the Físchlár digital library, a collection of over 300 hours of broadcast TV content which has been indexed to allow searching, browsing and playback of video. The system is in daily use by over 1,500 users on our University campus and is used for
teaching and learning, for research, and for entertainment. It is shortly to be made available to University libraries elsewhere in Ireland. The infrastructure we use is a Gigabit ETHERNET backbone and a conventional web browser for searching and browsing video content, with a browser plug-in for streaming video. As well as providing an overview of the system, the paper concentrates on the complimentary navigation techniques of browsing and searching which are supported within Físchlár

Irish Universities

http://doras.dcu.ie/328/1/terena_2002.pdf

The Físchlár digital library: networked access to a video archive of TV news

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