Two-dimensional string notation for representing video sequences

Kim Shearer, Dorota H. Kieronska, Svetha Venkatesh, C.-C. Jay Kuo
1995 Digital Image Storage and Archiving Systems  
Most current work on video indexing concentrates on queries which operate over high level semantic information which must be entirely composed and entered manually. We propose an indexing system which is based on spatial information about key objects in a scene. These key objects may be detected automatically, with manual supervision, and tracked through a sequence using one of a number of recently developed techniques. This representation is highly compact and allows rapid resolution of
more » ... specified by iconic example. A number of systems have been produced which use 2D string notations to index digital image libraries. Just as 2D strings provide a compact and tractable indexing notation for digital pictures, a sequence of 2D strings might provide an index for a video or image sequence. To improve further upon this we reduce the representation to the 2D string pair representing the initial frame, and a sequence of edits to these strings. This takes advantage of the continuity between frames to further reduce the size of the notation. By representing video sequences using string edits, a notation has been developed which is compact, and allows querying on the spatial relationships of objects to be performed without rebuilding the majority of the scene. Calculating ranks of objects directly from the edit sequence allows matching with minimal calculation, thus greatly reducing search time. This paper presents the edit sequence notation and algorithms for evaluating queries over image sequences. A number of optimisations which represent a considerable saving in search time is demonstrated in the paper. Keywords: video indexing, 2D strings, spatial reasoning, Digital storage of video requires large amounts of space, and can be very slow to process. Rather than process the video data directly, we would prefer to produce an index which allows filtering before accessing the full data.
doi:10.1117/12.227261 fatcat:dxdqadcwgnbhxmmsmjrzsq3grm