A low access latency video portal

Using a meaningful combination of advanced video processing techniques, the development of a low-access latency video portal is presented. The main objective is to overcome the speed limitations of existing video indexing and retrieval systems. Due to the linear and data intensive nature of video, the temporal segmentation of video sequences is the first step towards the implementation of the system. Video is first partitioned into basic units called shots. Thereafter, each single shot can he identified by a key-frame containing the most relevant scene information. For the sake of efficiency these processing steps are carried out in the compressed domain. Once key frames have been extracted a family of successively simplified image features is defined using colour histograms. The image colour distribution is quantised according to a scale-parameter obtained by convolving the colour distribution function with Gaussians of increasing size. The generated family of histograms is then used to define descriptors at various levels of detail. Using the hierarchical descriptor structure, irrelevant details and noise are removed in a very early processing step.