Recent advances in digital video compression and networks have made video more accessible than ever. However, the existing content-based video retrieval systems still suffer from the following problems. 1 ) Semantics-sensitive video classification problem because of the semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level semantic visual concepts; 2) Integrated video access problem because of the lack of efficient video database indexing, automatic video annotation, and

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... summary organization techniques. In this paper, we have proposed a novel framework, called ClassView, to make some advances toward more efficient video database indexing and access. 1) A hierarchical semantics-sensitive video classifier is proposed to shorten the semantic gap. The hierarchical tree structure of the semantics-sensitive video classifier is derived from the domain-dependent concept hierarchy of video contents in a database. Relevance analysis is used for selecting the discriminating visual features with suitable importances. The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is also used to determine the classification rule for each visual concept node in the classifier. 2) A hierarchical video database indexing and summary presentation technique is proposed to support more effective video access over a large-scale database. The hierarchical tree structure of our video database indexing scheme is determined by the domain-dependent concept hierarchy which is also used for video classification. The presentation of visual summary is also integrated with the inherent hierarchical video database indexing tree structure. Integrating video access with efficient database indexing tree structure has provided great opportunity for supporting more powerful video search engines. Index Terms-Video classification, video database indexing, video retrieval, visual summarization.