Multimedia databases: Description, analysis, modeling, and retrieval

With rapidly growing collections of images, news programs, music videos, movies, digital television programs, and training and education videos on the Internet and corporate intranets, new tools are needed to harness digital media for different applications, ranging from image and video cataloging, to media archival and search, multimedia authoring and synthesis, and smart browsing. In recent years, we have witnessed the growing momentum in building systems that can query and search video collections efficiently and accurately for desired video segments, just in the manner text search engines on the web have enabled easy retrieval of documents containing a required piece of text located on a server anywhere in the world. Digital video archival and management systems are also important to postproduction houses, broadcast studios, stock footage houses, and advertising agencies working with large videotape and multimedia collections, to enable integration of content in their end-to-end business processes. Further, since the digital form of videos enables rapid content editing, manipulation, and synthesis, there is burgeoning interest in building cheap, personal desktop video production tools.