Introduction To Video Search Engines

The evolution of technology has set the stage for the rapid growth of the video Web: broadband Internet access is ubiquitous, and streaming media protocols, systems, and encoding standards are mature. In addition to Web video delivery, users can easily contribute content captured on low cost camera phones and other consumer products. The media and entertainment industry no longer views these developments as a threat to their established business practices, but as an opportunity to provide services for more viewers in a wider range of consumption contexts. The emergence of IPTV and mobile video services offers unprecedented access to an ever growing number of broadcast channels and provides the flexibility to deliver new, more personalized video services. Highly capable portable media players allow us to take this personalized content with us, and to consume it even in places where the network does not reach. Video search engines enable users to take advantage of these emerging video resources for a wide variety of applications including entertainment, education and communications. However, the task of information extr- tion from video for retrieval applications is challenging, providing opp- tunities for innovation. This book aims to first describe the current state of video search engine technology and second to inform those with the req- site technical skills of the opportunities to contribute to the development of this field. Today’s Web search engines have greatly improved the accessibility and therefore the value of the Web.

David Gibbon joined Bell Laboratories in 1985 and is currently a Lead Member of Technical Staff in the Video and Multimedia Services Research Department at AT&T Labs - Research. His research interests include multimedia processing for searching and browsing of video databases and real-time video processing for communications applications. David has written book chapters and encyclopedia articles as well as numerous technical papers; he has 40 US patent filings and holds 14 US patents in the areas of multimedia indexing, streaming, and video analysis; and he is a member of the ACM, and a senior member of the IEEE. David contributes to IPTV industry standards for metadata and in 2007 he was awarded the AT&T Science and Technology Medal for outstanding technical leadership and innovation in the field of Video and Multimedia Processing and Digital Content Management.

Zhu Liu joined AT&T Labs - Research in 2000, and he is currently a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Video and Multimedia Services Research Department. His research interests include multimedia content processing, multimedia databases, pattern recognition, and machine learning. Zhu holds 7 US patents and he is the inventor of more than 20 pending patents in the areas of multimedia service and content analysis. He has published more than 40 refereed papers in international leading journals and at key conferences in the areas of multimedia. He is a member of ACM and Tau Beta Pi, and a senior member of the IEEE.