Jung Min Song

Video-Gadget: MPEG-7-based audio-visual content indexing and browsing engine

MPEG-7 is a standard to provide a standardized way of describing contents of multimedia information. The development of technologies related to the MPEG-7 and exploiting MPEG-7 applications have been a main research interest of us for the last two years. TV broadcasting is one specific area of interest among various applications to which MPEG-7 can be of benefit. The VideoGadgetTM, which is an indexing and retrieval engine of multimedia data, is designed to aid user friendly environment of Digital TV as well as conventional analogue TV. By enabling automatic feature extraction and indexing of received TV program with help of low-cost random access storage device, a dull and conventional TV can turn into an interactive personalized entertainment center. With various user-friendly functionalities such as non-linear browsing of received programs, structure-based navigation, and searching/filtering of programs, the user can view the received program anytime the user prefers in the way the user prefers. Even though the Video-GadgetTM project, which is currently in progress, aims an environment of the Digital TV broadcast with MPEG-7 descriptions, a version of the Video-GadgetTM is under development to actually generate MPEG-7-like descriptions while the analogue stream is received. The real-time generation of the content description in detail brings many problems to solve such as limited I/O bandwidth and computing power and extensive sharing of the system resources. Due to the limited resource, some features are impossible to be extract in the real time, the functionality using those features should be redesigned to use simpler features. Once the Digital TV broadcast with MPEG-7 descriptions become available, the feature extraction part of the Video-GadgetTM will be employed by the MPEG7 description generation server or the service provider and only the retrieval engine including search, browsing, and filtering functionality will remain in the client part.

MPEG-7-based news browsing: description extraction, browsing, and exchange

MPEG-7 is a leading standard of providing a standardized way of describing multimedia contents, among various metadata standards. In the fields of consumer electronics, providing an easy-to-use user interface for the majority of naive users is one of the most important issues in the development of MPEG-7 applications. The proposed news browser provides an intuitive interface for conventional VCR users, while providing a powerful way of browsing news articles of interest. The news browser is based on four images automatically extracted from each article of the selected news program. Anchor shot image is selected mainly for the purpose of separating each article. The icon image extracted from the anchor shot image provides a single image summarization of the given article. The synthesized key text image helps users to roughly understand the content by providing selected text information. The episode shot image provides supplementary visual aid to the user by showing a single key frame from the episode shot. By giving a glimpse at the selected four images, the users can get a rough idea on each article and select only the article of interest to be played. The extracted description including key images for the browser and the structure information is generated based on the MPEG-7 standard to provide interoperability between the standard based applications.