Technical Reports

1998

More and more audio-visual information is available in digital form, in various places around the world. Along with the information, people appear that want to use it. Before one can use any information, however, it will have to be located first. At the same time, the increasing availability of potentially interesting material makes this search harder. Currently, solutions exist that allow searching for textual information. Many text-based search engines are available on the World Wide Web, and they are among the most visited sites - indicating they foresee a real demand. Identifying information is, however, not possible for audio-visual content, as no generally recognised description of this material exists. In general, it is not possible to efficiently search the web for, say, a picture of ``the Motorbike from Terminator II'', or to search a sequence where ``King Lear congratulates his assistants on the night after the battle,'' or to search for ``twenty minutes of video according to my preferences of today''. In specific cases, solutions do exist. Multimedia databases on the market today allow searching for pictures using characteristics like colour, texture and information about the shape of objects in the picture. One could envisage a similar example for audio, in which one can whistle a melody to find a song. The question of finding content is not restricted to database retrieval applications; also in other areas similar questions exist. For instance, there is an increasing amount of (digital) broadcast channels available, and this makes it harder to select the broadcast channel (radio or TV) that is potentially interesting.