Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system – Display driving control circuitry – Controlling the condition of display elements
Reexamination Certificate
1999-02-22
2002-10-08
Nguyen, Cao H (Department: 2173)
Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system
Display driving control circuitry
Controlling the condition of display elements
C345S215000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06462754
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND
1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to authoring, extracting and linking video objects and more particularly, to authoring video by defining objects of interest in the video.
2. Description of the Related Art
Multimedia information is often very complex, drawing on a number of sources and containing large amounts of data. To make the multimedia information usable, it is preferable to create relevant and appropriate subject matter by employing all of the sources available, for example, through the use of hyperlinks. This provides the user a way to navigate a multimedia document based on present needs. Thus, the user has the capability to extract and visualize relevant information without actually having to look at all the information present. This is especially useful for videos which have become very popular and are being generated at an ever increasing rate by a variety of sources such as defense/civilian satellites, scientific experiments, biomedical imaging, industrial inspections, home entertainment systems etc. Typically, in these applications, the use of video clips is needed along with other media forms like audio, text, images etc. For example, for an electronic manual, while describing the characteristics of a machine part, it may be appropriate to permit the user to view a video clip of a relevant subpart. In that clip, the subpart may be highlighted, which if clicked on takes the user either to some other relevant source of information or back to the original text.
It would be advantageous to create links between an object that is visible for a certain duration in the video and other related information. Also, the duration of a video clip might have several linked objects existing either simultaneously or in different time windows linking to different destinations based on the content. To be able to use this information in a meaningful way in conjunction with all the other media types, i.e. text, images, audio etc., it is important to segment and structure the video and to create appropriate links between objects in different sections of a video and pertinent information in other media forms.
In concept, this is related to that of hypertext. It offers users a path to follow based on the user's interest and the content of the video. Just like a web page, at any instance, several static and dynamic links can be available simultaneously within the video space. There is however, one crucial difference, unlike a web page, the link opportunities only exist in a fixed temporal window which disappears after the object of interest disappears, unless of course, the user stops the video player, rewinds and plays it again, in which case the link opportunities reappear. In other words, links in these cases have an extra dimension, that of time.
As mentioned above, the concept of hyperlinked video or hypervideo originated out of hyperlinked text or hypertext. Early work in this genre includes, for example, Storyspace, described in J. D. Bolter,
Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing
, Lawrence Earlbaum and Associates, Hillsdale, N.J. 1991, a hypertext writing environment from Eastgate Systems that employs a spatial metaphor in displaying links and nodes. Users create writing spaces, or containers for text and images, which are then linked to other writing spaces. The writing spaces form a hierarchical structure that users can visually manipulate and reorganize. Synthesis, described in C. Potts, et al. “Collaborative pre-writing with a video based group working memory”, Tech-Report, Graphics Usability and Visualization Center, Georgia Institute of Technology, pp. 93-95, 1993, is a tool based on Storyspace and allows one to index and navigate analog video content associated with text in writing spaces. Synthesis may be used in the production of hypervideo in the design and prototyping stages. It provided an early demonstration for text to video linking. Video to video linking was first demonstrated in the hypermedia journal Elastic Charles, described in H. P. Brondmo et al.
Creating and Viewing the Elastic Charles—A Hypermedia Journal in Hypertext: State of the Art
, Intellect, Oxford, UK, 1991, developed at the Interactive Cinema Group of the MIT media laboratory. Micons or miniaturized movie loops briefly appear to indicate video links. This prototype relied on analog video and laser disc technology requiring two screens. Today, digital video allows much more sophistication.
In the interactive Kon-Tiki Museum, described in G. Liestol, “Aesthetic and rhetorical aspects of linking video in hypermedia”, Proc. Hypertext-94, ACM Press, New York, pp. 217-223, 1994, there is continuous linking present from video to text and video to video via the exchange of basic qualities between the media types. Time dependence was added to text and spatial simultaneity to video.
Videobook, as described in R. Ogawa et al., “Design strategies for scenario-based hypermedia: description of its structure, dynamics and style”, Proc. Hypertext-92, ACM Press, New York, pp. 71-80, 1992, demonstrated time based scenario-oriented hypermedia. Here, multimedia content was organized using a nodal representation and timer driven links were automatically activated to present the content, based on the time attributes. In L. Hardman et al., “The Amsterdam hypermedia model: Adding time and content to the dexter model”, Communications of the ACM, 37:50-62, 1995, they used timing to explicitly state the source and destination contexts when links were followed. In M. C. Buchanen et al., “Specifying temporal behavior in hypermedia documents”, Proc. Hypertext-92, ACM Press, New York, pages 71-80, 1992, the authors created hypermedia documents by manipulating temporal relationships among media elements at a high level, rather than as timings.
Vactive™ from Ephyx Technologies and HotVideo™ from International Business Machines allow a limited set of links so that upon user interaction, either another section of the same video or another video starts playing or a web browser is directed to a specified URL address. It allows for elementary tracking, thereby permitting one to track objects for simple motion where the object doesn't change shape. However, the user has to go through the video and then find out the start and the end frames for such a tracking, and if there is a mistake, the user has to redraw the outline. These systems do not provide any way to semi-automatically organize the video, and the links permitted for use are limited. Authoring of these links needs to be done manually. This limits the flexibility and usability of these systems.
While in concept there is a similarity between hypertext and hypervideo, in terms of actual realization, several of the ideas need to be reformulated to accommodate the dynamic scope of video. Thus, the links need to be both temporal as well as spatial. And the authoring needs to encode this information. Similar is the case for navigating these links. Therefore, a need exits for a system and method for simplifying authoring of a video for hyperlinking wherein the user is not required to go through the entire video in order to identify objects of interest. A further need exists for interpolating capability between the start and end frames of the locations of the objects of interest to give precise location information without excessive computational overhead. A still further need exists for a motion analysis method to further break up the shots into subshots and use automatic hyperlinking to link the video clips or the objects thereof to different parts of a document system.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
A method for authoring video documents includes the steps of inputting video data to be processed, segmenting the video data into shots by identifying breaks between the shots, subdividing the shots into subshots using motion analysis to provide location information of objects of interest undergoing motion, describing boundaries for the objects of interest in the video data such that the objects of interest are represented by the b
Chakraborty Amit
Hsu Liang
Liu Peiya
Abmed Adel A.
Nguyen Cao H
Siemens Corporate Research Inc.
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