The present disclosure relates to technologies for browsing, indexing, sharing, summarizing, and searching videos.
In recent years, two major technology advancements have created an important trend in everyday life: digital video applications technologies have become increasingly popular; the Internet has enabled people to be increasingly connected. Mobile technologies have improved from making simple phone calls to smart phones and tablets that are powerful computer devices equipped with high definition cameras and connected in 4G wireless networks. Many people now have two cameras in the front and back of their mobile devices always ready to video record of everything happening in their lives. People are willing to share the videos with their friends or the whole world. Digital video signals can now be streamed to mobile devices and computers over the Internet, and to Digital TV at homes. People also want to review old videos to find something or a place or someone that they met. The amount of video recording per user has increased from once a month or a week to several times per day, especially more during holidays, vacations, and other special events. The task of tagging all the videos has become a real challenge to many users. In the near future, people want to use videos as they have been text and images.
A challenge in digital video applications today is a lack of video tools for managing videos in the same flexible way as we manage web and text content. Today video searching is conducted based on tag (metadata) that users associated to videos. The searches are manual and are text based, which requires time and effort from the user.
Moreover, user text tagging is always under the criteria of the user, which can change over time for the same user, and are usually different from the criteria of the user's family and friends with whom the user's videos are to be shared. Thus searching the even tagged videos can become a difficult task for the same user over time and for different users.
It is very difficult and time consuming to use current technologies to browse, organize, share, and search the long video files stored in smart phones, tablets, and computers.
Some products have made initial attempt to address this problem by recognizing faces of people in the video and tag them as metadata. The tags can be used to search people in videos. But these products have limited applications because not all events involve people or human faces and even a person is recognized, more detailed classifications are often needed to recognize the nature of the events.
Some approaches select a few frames that are called “key frames” which are a set of pictures or slides that capture key moments in a video. This “key frames” can significantly reduce file size from a video to a set of pictures, but it pays a heavy price because movement and audio, the essential properties of a video, are lost in the process.
There is therefore still a need to provide simple and effective tools for people to browse, index, share, and search videos in a similar fashion as people manage text and web content.