THE VISITORS GUIDE: A SIMPLE VIDEO REUSE APPLICATION

One of the results of the surge in interest in the internet is the great increase in availability of pictorial and video data. Web browsers such as Netscape give access to an enormous range of such data. In order to make use of large amounts of pictorial and video data, it is necessary to develop indexing and retrieval methods. Pictorial databases have made great progress recently, to the extent that there are now a number of commercially available products. Video databases are now being researched and developed from a number of different viewpoints. Given a general indexing scheme for video, the next step is to reuse clips in further applications.

In this paper we present an initial application for the reuse of video clips. The aim of the system is to resequence video clips for a particular application. We have chosen a well-constrained application for this purpose, the aim being to produce a video tour of a campus between designated start and destination points from a set of indexed video clips. We use clips of a guide entering and leaving buildings on our campus, and when visitors select a start location and a destination, the system will retrieve clips suitable for guiding the visitor along the correct path. The system uses an index of spatial relationships of key objects for the video clips to decide which clips provide the correct sequence of motion around the campus.

Although the full power of the indexing notation is unnecessary for this simple problem, the results from this initial implementation indicate that the concept could be applicable to more complex problems.