My purpose in writing Interactive Video: Algorithms and Technologies is to respond to an increased demand for a complete scienti?c guide that covers concepts, bene?ts, algorithms and interfaces of the emerging interactive digital video technology. This technology promises an end of the days of dull videos, linear playback, manual video search, and non-consent video-content. Many futurists and I share the view that interactive video is becoming the future standard of the most attractive video formats which will o?er users n- conventional interactive features, powerful knowledge-acquisition and teaching tools, e?cient storage, as well as non-linear ways of navigation and searching. In recent years, video content has skyrocketed as a result of decreasing cost of video acquisition and storage devices, increasing network bandwidth capacities, and improving compression techniques. The rapid expansion of Internet connectivity and increasing interest in video-on-demand, e-learning and other online multimedia rich applications, makes video as accessible as any static data type like text and graphic. The “open video” market that enables consumers to buy and rent digital videos over Internet, is taking another important boost as video distribution is becoming available for people on “the move”. Now they can select, download and view various video types on their consumer electronics devices like mobileTV and video-playing iPods.
This is a groundbreaking resource that covers both algorithms and technologies of interactive videos, so that businesses in IT and data managements, scientists, teachers, and software engineers in video processing and computer vision, coaches and instructors that use video technology in teaching, and finally end-users of hyper videos will greatly benefit from it. This comprehensive four part book contains excellent scientific and up-to-date contributions made by a number of pioneering scientists, futurists and experts in the field. The first part introduces the reader to interactive and hyper video rhetoric, algorithms and technologies. It also presents effective automatic audio-video summarization methodologies. In the second part, a list of advanced computer vision and signal processing algorithms and systems for automatic and semiautomatic analysis and editing of audio-video documents are presented. The third part tackles a more challenging level of the transformation from raw to enriched video format, filtering of the video content by extracting and linking of highlights, events, and meaningful semantic units. In particular, a detailed example of the Computational Media Aesthetics approach at work towards understanding the semantics of instructional media through automated analysis for e-learning content annotation is presented. The last part is reserved for interactive video searching engines, non-linear video content browsing and quick video navigational systems.
