Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system – Display driving control circuitry – Controlling the condition of display elements
Reissue Patent
2000-09-13
2004-01-27
Sax, Steven (Department: 2174)
Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system
Display driving control circuitry
Controlling the condition of display elements
C345S215000, C345S215000
Reissue Patent
active
RE038401
ABSTRACT:
The present invention relates to the field of interfaces for video information. More particularly, the present invention provides interactive interfaces for video information and toolkits for use in creation of such interactive interfaces.
BACKGROUND AND SUMMARY
Video information is being produced at an ever-increasing rate and video sequences, especially short sequences, are increasingly being used, for example, in websites and on CD-ROM, and being created, for example, by domestic use of camcorders. There is a growing need for tools enabling the indexing, handling and interacting with video data. It is particularly necessary for interfaces to be provided which enable a user to access video information selectively and to interact with that information, especially in a non-sequential way.
Conventionally, video information consists of a sequence of frames recorded at a fixed time interval. In the case of classic television signals, for example, the video information consists of 25 or 30 frames per second. Each frame is meaningful since it corresponds to an image which can be viewed. A frame may be made up of a number of interlaced fields, but this is not obligatory as is seen from more recently proposed video formats, such as those intended for high definition television. Frames describe the temporal decomposition of the video image information. Each frame contains image information structured in terms of lines and pixels, which represent the spatial decomposition of the video.
In the present document, the terms “video information” or “video sequences” refer to data representing a visual image recorded over a given time period, without reference to the length of that time period or the structure of the recorded information. Thus, the term “video sequence” will be used to refer to any series of video frames, regardless of whether this series corresponds to a single camera shot (recorded between two cuts) or to a plurality of shots or scenes.
Traditionally, if a user desired to know what was the content of a particular video sequence he was obliged to watch as each frame, or a sub-sample of the frames, of the sequence was displayed successively in time. (For purposes of this document, the terms “he,” “him,” or “his” are used for convenience in place of she/he, her/him and hers/his, and are intended to be gender-neutral.) This approach is still wide-spread, and in applications where video data is accessed using a personal computer, the interface to the video often consists of a displayed window in which the video sequence is contained and a set of displayed controls similar to those found on a video tape recorder (allowing fastforward, rewind, etc.).
Developments in the fields of video indexing and video editing have provided other forms of interface to video information.
In the field of video indexing, it is necessary to code information contained in a video sequence in order to enable subsequent retrieval of the sequence from a database by reference to keywords or concepts. The coded content may, for example, identify the types of objects present in the video sequence, their properties/motion, the type of camera movements involved in the video sequence (pan, tracking shot, zoom, etc.), and other properties. A “summary” of the coded document may be prepared, consisting of certain representative frames taken from the sequence, together with text information or icons indicating how the sequence has been coded. The interface for interacting with the video database typically includes a computer input device enabling the user to specify objects or properties of interest and, in response to the query, the computer determines which video sequences in the database correspond to the input search terms and displays the appropriate “summaries”. The user then indicates whether or not a particular video sequence should be reproduced. Examples of products using this approach are described in the article “Advanced Imaging Product Survey: Photo, Document and Video” from the journal “Advances Imaging”, October 1994, which document is incorporated herein by this reference.
In some video indexing schemes, the video sequence is divided up into shorter series of frames based upon the scene changes or the semantic content of the video information. A hierarchical structure may be defined. Index “summaries” may be produced for the different series of frames corresponding to nodes in the hierarchical structure. In such a case, at the time when a search is made, the “summary” corresponding to a complete video sequence may be retrieved for display to the user who is then allowed to request display of “summaries” relating to sub-sections of the video sequence which are lower down in the hierarchical structure. If the user so wishes, a selected sequence or sub-section is reproduced on the display monitor. Such a scheme is described in EP-A-0 555 028 which is incorporated herein by this reference.
A disadvantage of such traditional, indexing/searching interfaces to video sequences is that the dynamic quality of the video information is lost.
Another approach, derived from the field of video editing, consists of the “digital storyboard”. The video sequence is segmented into scenes and one or more representative frames from each scene is selected and displayed, usually accompanied by text information, side-by-side with representative frames from other segments. The user now has both a visual overview of all the scenes and a direct visual access to individual scenes. Each representative frame of the storyboard can be considered to be an icon. Selection of the icon via a pointing device (typically a mouse-controlled cursor) causes the associated video sequence or subsequence to be reproduced. Typical layouts for the storyboards are two-dimensional arrays or long one-dimensional strips. In the first case, the user scans the icons from the left to the right, line by line, whereas in the second case the user needs to move the strip across the screen.
Digital storyboards are typically created by a video editor who views the video sequence, segments the data into individual scenes and places each scene, with a descriptive comment, onto the storyboard. As is well-known from technical literature, many steps of this process can be automated. For example, different techniques for automatic detection of scene changes are discussed in the following documents, each of which is incorporated herein by reference:
“A Real-time neural approach to scene cut detection” by Ardizzone et al, IS&T/SPLE—Storage & Retrieval for Image and Video Databases IV, San Jose, Calif.
“Digital Video Segmentation” by Hampapur et al, ACM Multimedia '94 Proceedings, ACM Press-1
“Extraction of News Articles based on Scene Cut Detection using DCT Clustering” by Ariki et al, International Conference on Image Processing, September 1996, Lausanne, Switzerland;
“Automatic partitioning of full-motion video” by HoncJiang Zhang et al, Multimedia Systems (Springer-Verfaa, 199')), 1, pages 10-28-, and
EP-A-0 590 759.
Various methods for automatically detecting and tracking persons and objects in video sequences are considered in the following documents, each of which is incorporated herein by reference:
“Modeling, Analysis and Visualization of Nonrigid Object Motion”, by T. S. Huang, Proc. of International Conf. on Pattern Recognition, Vol. 1, pp 361-364, Atlantic City, N.J., June 1990- and
“Segmentation of People in Motion” by Shio et al, Proc. IEEE, vol. 79, pp 325332, 1991. Techniques for automatically detecting different types of camera shot are described in
“Global zoom/pan estimation and compensation for video compression” by Tse et al, Proc. ICASSP, Vol.4,pp 2725-2728, May 1991; and
“Differential estimation of the global motion parameters zoom and pan” by M. Hoetter, Signal Processing, Vol. 16, pp 249-265, 1989.
In the case of digital storyboards too, the dynamic quality of the video sequence is often lost or obscured. Some impression of the movement inherent in the video sequence can be preserved by selecting several frames to represent each s
Goldberg Cihl Mozest
Madrane Nabil
Kilpatrick & Stockton LLP
Obvious Technology, Inc.
Sax Steven
LandOfFree
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