A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyWith the advent of digital imagery and its wide spread application in all vistas of life, it has become an important component in the world of communication. Video content ranging from broadcast news, sports, personal videos, surveillance, movies and entertainment and similar domains is increasing exponentially in quantity and it is becoming a challenge to retrieve content of interest from the corpora. This has led to an increased interest amongst the researchers to investigate concepts of video structure analysis, feature extraction, content annotation, tagging, video indexing, querying and retrieval to fulfil the requirements. However, most of the previous work is confined within specific domain and constrained by the quality, processing and storage capabilities. This thesis presents a novel framework agglomerating the established approaches from feature extraction to browsing in one system of content based video retrieval. The proposed framework significantly fills the gap identified while satisfying the imposed constraints of processing, storage, quality and retrieval times. The output entails a framework, methodology and prototype application to allow the user to efficiently and effectively retrieved content of interest such as age, gender and activity by specifying the relevant query. Experiments have shown plausible results with an average precision and recall of 0.91 and 0.92 respectively for face detection using Haar wavelets based approach. Precision of age ranges from 0.82 to 0.91 and recall from 0.78 to 0.84. The recognition of gender gives better precision with males (0.89) compared to females while recall gives a higher value with females (0.92). Activity of the subject has been detected using Hough transform and classified using Hiddell Markov Model. A comprehensive dataset to support similar studies has also been developed as part of the research process. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) providing a friendly and intuitive interface has been integrated into the developed system to facilitate the retrieval process. The comparison results of the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) shows that the performance of the system closely resembles with that of the human annotator. The performance has been optimised for time and error rate
