Summarizing Video Information Using Self-Organizing Maps

Facing a huge amount of multimedia information available today, it becomes inevitably necessary to develop efficient methods for accessing, searching, structuring, and representing it. Multimedia retrieval systems especially in the case of video should support users in all of these tasks. Therefore, specialized systems that focus on each of these aspects have been developed. However, an open research perspective issue is the development of a retrieval tool that integrates all user interactions in a single interface. In this paper, we present a system that focuses on the summarization of one single video. We consider the structuring and visualization components including reasonable user interactions to have the most significant influence on the systems usability. Our prototype is based on growing self-organizing maps. The emphasis is on intuitive hierarchical interaction for content visualization exploiting the features of the maps and integrating additional potentially useful information.